CHAPTER SEVENTEEN  Chamber of the Conjuror

Sparten led them briskly through the glittering upper lobby and directly under the hexagonal overhead viewport. Norla had only the briefest of chances to look up at the massive bulk of SCO Station looming overheard. Even then, she had to break into a trot to catch up with the other two, nearly stumbling in the noticeably higher gravity. She had forgotten how much of a nuisance variable gravity was aboard a spinning station.

Directly below the overhead viewport was a circular open space in the deck, or floor, whatever one might call it here, with a low railing around it. The opening took up about half the space under the overhead viewport and was centered exactly under it. Norla looked down and saw a vast atrium, a great open space, circular in cross section. It extended five levels down. On each level below her there were people leaning on the railings, looking up or down or across, pointing things out to each other.

Norla looked straight down to the lowest level. She saw three wedge-shaped pools of still water, the barest of ripples ruffling their mirrored surfaces. She looked down into the pool directly beneath her, and spotted her own far-off reflection, framed by the view out the hexagonal overhead port above her. Down there in the still water, she could see the reflection of SCO Station looming up behind her. Between the water wedges were three walkways that met at a central circular dais, exactly in the center of the lowest level. Norla looked up, craning her neck to see SCOStation overhead and figuring the sight lines. If one stood at that central dais on the lowest level, one could look straight up at the viewport in Ring Park through which Norla had seen the station.

Koffield glanced down at the atrium, but did not break stride. He kept right on, still with his secured container, and Sparten kept pace with him. Norla lingered at the railing for a moment longer, then hurried to catch up. She found them waiting for her in yet another elevator car.

This one was a more conventional sort of windowless box. She stepped inside, the door shut, and they proceeded down. No one spoke. As they moved still farther away from the axis of rotation, Norla’s apparent weight increased still further, up to about three-quarters of Earth gravity. The sensation of getting heavier made it seem as if she were riding an elevator moving up, not down, leaving her more confused than ever by this inside-out, upside-down building. She watched the numbers on the display count down from Upper Level, to 5, to 4, 3, 2, and then Main Level, where the base of the atrium was. She expected the car to stop and the doors to open there, but instead it kept going. The display blanked out, as if the level they were going to had no name, no number.

The elevator came to a halt, and the door slid open. They stepped out, Norla going first.

She had only time to see they were in an office, with a man at a desk ahead and off to the left, before the fumes hit her. The pungent odor of burning leaves assaulted Norla’s nose, and she blinked back sudden tears as a haze of smoke clawed at her eyes and throat. She sneezed twice, hard, then coughed violently.

All she could think of was that, somehow, the bad air caused by the refugee crisis had all somehow pooled down here, at the very base of the Gondola. Half-blinded by her tears, she turned back toward the elevator car. They had to get out of here, head back up, alert the life-support people—

“Sorry about that,” a flat, laconic voice said. “I forget sometimes it hits some people pretty hard. Wait a sec while I jack up the air blowers and the scrubbers.”

A low rush of cool, clean air enveloped Norla. She coughed once or twice more, then breathed easier.

She rubbed her eyes and blinked to clear them. The world blurred and shimmered before it settled down to reveal that the man behind the desk had stood up to face them. He glanced down at his desk and closed some sort of control panel, then looked back toward his visitors.

He was a round-faced, tough-looking, angry-looking man. Short, heavyset, almost squat. He was very dark-skinned and his scalp was utterly hairless. His eyes were brown, deep-set, and penetrating, the whites of his eyes oddly yellowed. He was scowling as he looked at them, but somehow Norla got the impression that it had nothing to do with them. A scowl was the expression that his face fell into naturally.

“Come on in,” he said, and picked something up from a shallow container on his desk and stuck one end of it in the corner of his mouth. It was a brown cylinder about fifteen centimeters long and about a centimeter and a half wide. His face twitched, and the end of the cylinder glowed orange for a second. He took the thing out of his mouth, blew a stream of smoke out into the air, and put the thing back in his mouth.

Norla stared in fascination. She had heard of such things, but she had never actually seen anyone smoking a cigar before.

“I’m Commander Karlin Raenau,” the man said. “They got me running this shop these days. Come on in and have a seat.” Raenau glanced over at Sparten. “No need for you to hang around,” he said. “You go get some real work done.”

“Yes, sir,” Sparten said, then saluted and withdrew. Norla watched as he stepped back into the elevator and the doors shut—and was startled to realize that the elevator shaft did not extend this far down. When the car rose into the ceiling, it left nothing behind but a blank spot in the floor in the center of the vast circular office. A ceiling hatch irised shut after the car was gone.

“He’s a good boy, but he gets me nervous,” Raenau said to no one in particular. Raenau sat back down behind his desk and gestured for Norla and Koffield to sit on the visitors’ chairs facing him. Raenau regarded his guests thoughtfully and did not speak at first.

Norla took advantage of the moment to glance around the office. She began to realize that the vanishing elevator was far from the only strange feature of the place. The room was circular in its floor plan, half again as wide around as the main deck of the Cruzeiro do Sul. The ceiling was gunmetal grey, but the floor and walls were done in a single shade of flat matte silver. It was not until she noticed the faint image of a ship wheeling past under the floor and up one side of the wall that she realized the entire room, except for the ceiling, was made of adjustable-reflectance glass, smart glass, all of it cranked up to maximum opacity.

There was a woven decorative hanging, with an abstract pattern, suspended from a freestanding frame that stood behind her chair, where it was directly in Raenau’s line of sight as he sat at the desk. What looked like a big decorative folding screen, with a fanciful pattern of swimming fish on it, stood to the side of the desk, opposite where the elevator car had been. It was too big an object, and too carefully positioned, in a spot too inconveniently close to the desk, for something just intended to be pretty. Norla guessed it was some sort of data display.

There was a thick, lush, intricately decorated carpet under Raenau’s desk and the area in front of it, where she and Koffield sat. There were three or four groupings of furniture scattered about the open floor, each likewise with a decorative carpet beneath it, and with hangings or folding screens nearby. There was nothing actually hung from, or suspended from, the walls themselves.

The room seemed to take up the entire level of the building. There were no doors in any of the walls, and plainly there was nothing but stars and space beyond the opacified wall. Norla looked up into the ceiling and noted several other irised-shut hatches of various sizes. Some of the hatches were large enough to drop a compact kitchen or washroom into the room. Clearly the room was designed to be configured in a half dozen ways.

Big as the room was, it was nowhere as large across as what she had seen of the upper levels of the Gondola. She realized that this one office was hanging off the underside of the rest of the structure all by itself, a blister set into the base of the deepest tower, with no way in or out but through the ceiling.

“Lots of toys in here,” Raenau said, and Norla realized that he had been watching her as she looked around them. “I don’t ever use them much. I needed a place to work, and they gave me a button-pusher’s playground.”

“That’s all adjustable-reflectance glass, isn’t it?” Norla asked, gesturing at the floor and walls.

“Multiglass, that’s right. Hardly ever use that at all. Wanna see?”

Before either of them could answer, Raenau stabbed his finger down on a button and twisted a knob.

The lights died, dropping the chamber into utter blackness. Then the floors and walls faded away into nothing at all. Norla cried out in surprise and alarm. Even the unflappable Anton Koffield let out a faint gasp of surprise. Norla closed her eyes tight, held the arms of her chair in a death grip, and forced herself to calm down. She let go the arm of her chair and slowly opened her eyes, looking straight ahead at Raenau.

Or at least where Raenau should have been. There was nothing there but a small, faint dot of orange that flared and faded, flared and faded. Then she realized it was the end of his cigar, the ember glowing as he puffed on it.

She looked down, at the black outline of the carpet, and the planet swooping past it down below. The stars wheeled past, and a small orbital tug came into view. Norla stood up, swallowed hard, and walked toward the edge of the carpet, hesitated a moment, then stepped out onto the absolute nothingness beyond. She heard the click of her heels on the deck, and could feel the solidity of the deck under her. But for all of that, when she looked down she saw nothing there beneath her. She looked down between her feet and watched the universe, the stars, the planet, the darkness of the void wheeling past in stately procession.

She realized her hands were clenched into fists and forced them to relax. She looked behind herself, at the decorative fabric on the frame, right where Raenau could see it from his desk. Now she understood the carpets and the carefully positioned hangings all around the room. Even when the glass was set at maximum opacity, there was a certain amount of see-through. No one wanted to see the ghost of the planet swooping past out of the corner of his eyes every couple of minutes. She noted there was no such hanging behind Raenau’s desk. Either the man hadn’t thought of it, or else he felt it would be to his advantage to have his visitors distracted.

Her eyes were slowly adjusting to the darkness. She looked around the room and saw the clusters of furniture on their carpets, seemingly hanging in midair. She looked down again, and watched as the orbital tug rolled back into view. She got her bearings, then looked out through the forward wall, at.the fleet of ships, operational and derelict, that accompanied the station in its orbit. The room bloomed with light as the daylit planet swung past again.

Then the room lights came slowly up, though the walls and floor remained transparent. The people and objects in the room, which had been merely outlines and shadows, regained their solid forms. It was somehow stranger still to see brightly lit, real-looking objects seemingly suspended, motionless, in space.

Raenau stepped out from behind his desk and off the carpet onto the utterly transparent glass floor. He moved with a nonchalance that was a trifle overstudied, a sense of trying too hard to be casual about it.

He looked down at the stars beneath his feet and puffed thoughtfully on his cigar. “Here I am,” he said, “master of all I don’t survey.”

“I beg your pardon?” Koffield asked. He still sat, composedly, in his chair, well over any momentary surprise or shock he might have felt when the floor vanished. An interesting note, that. Both Raenau and Norla had felt the need to prove themselves, demonstrate their courage, by stepping out into nothingness. Koffield had stayed put.

“Master of all I don’t survey!’ Raenau repeated, and gestured downward with both hands. “I can quite literally see the whole universe from here, as the station rotates on its axis and orbits the planet. Sooner or later, every direction comes into view. The one thing I can’t see, the one direction I can’t look in, is toward the station I’m supposed to be running. That’s always invisible. They built this office—the whole damn Gondola—mostly as a way of impressing people, for the psychological effect. Make it all look big and grand. Makes the symbolism of not being able to see it from here even stranger, don’t you think?”

“To be frank,” said Koffield, “I’ve been thinking on that and many similar points since the moment we came aboard. The Gondola is a shrine to the spirit of narcissism. It seemed to have been designed for the sole purpose of being looked at from different angles, built merely for the sake of being constantly admired.”

Raenau nodded. “I don’t know that the architect would admit any such thing, but it’s probably true all the same.”

“Who was the architect? I mean no offense, but it seems to me that the person who built the Gondola must have been extremely self-absorbed, and yet extremely self-unaware.”

Raenau laughed out loud, took the cigar from his mouth, and held a most theatrical finger to his lips, signaling for silence. “Careful who hears you say that,” he said in a loud stage whisper. “The Gondola and DeSilvo Tower are based on sketches left behind by the great Dr. Oskar DeSilvo himself.”

“That,” said Koffield, “does not surprise me in the least.”

Raenau chuckled to himself once again and walked back to his desk. He sat down and twisted a knob on the recessed control panel. The nothingness, the stars and the sky under Norla’s feet, faded away into the dull silver of the solid floor. If she looked very carefully, and very closely, she could still catch a glimpse of the brightest objects as they rolled past, but it wasn’t easy.

Quite suddenly, she realized how foolish she must have looked, standing there peering down at the floor between her feet. Blushing with absolutely pointless embarrassment, she returned to her own chair and sat down.

“Damned translucent walls,” Raenau growled. “They drive me nuts. It’s the same everywhere, in- all the private areas on the Gondola. Everyone moves in, twittering about the view, the view, the view—and then they realize they can’t stand having the universe wheeling past every minute of the day. The place is built for the sake of the views—and we’ve all put up shutters and screens and hangings to block it out.”

Raenau stubbed out his cigar in the dish-shaped receptacle—an ashtray, that’s what it was called—and pulled a box out of a drawer on his desk. He opened it and took another cigar from it. He was on the verge of putting the box back when he hesitated for a moment. Norla hoped that the man had realized how rude it would be to light another of the damned noxious things in front of guests, and would therefore put them away.

But Raenau’s hesitation had another motive, albeit one still couched in manners. “Sorry,” he said. “I should have offered these”—he held the box up—”to you people. I don’t suppose either of you would care for a cigar?”

“No, thank you,” Norla replied, hoping her tone wasn’t too vehement. “I don’t, ah, smoke.”

“Hardly anyone does,” Raenau said sadly. “Admiral Koffield? How about you?”

Norla had been expecting a refusal as firm as her own, if perhaps a more diplomatic one. Instead, Anton Koffield got a strange, faraway look in his eye. “I haven’t had a proper cigar in twenty years subjective,” he said. “Nearly a century and a half, objective time.”

“Cuban,” said Raenau, offering the box to Koffield.
“Not Cuban seed grown twenty light-years from Earth, or
Cuban-made from Texas leaf, or any of that nonsense. The
real thing.” The tone of his voice made it plain he was try
ing to tempt Koffield, but extolling the virtues of Cuba
meant nothing to Norla.”

“How the devil could you get true Cuban cigars out here?” Koffield asked, standing up and taking the box. He opened it and examined the contents with an expression that was almost reverent.

“Let’s just say I have friends in low places. And shipping techniques have improved some while you’ve been, ah, out of circulation.”

Koffield selected a cigar and handed the box back to Raenau, who put it carefully away. Koffield held the cigar under his nose and sniffed deeply, then held it to his ear and seem to listen to it for some reason, as he rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. Raenau produced a complicated-looking small gadget from his jacket pocket and handed it to Koffield, who used it to snip the end off the cigar. Raenau produced a second device from the same pocket, and Koffield had to puzzle over it for a second, before he got it to create a small jet of flame. He put the cigar in his mouth, and played the fire from the flame-maker over the far end of the cigar, while studiously sucking in his breath through the cigar.

It took a good long while for this process to get the thing lit and burning to Koffield’s satisfaction, and then, of course, Raenau had to repeat the entire procedure in order to get his cigar going.

It was plain that there was some sense of ritual about the whole thing, that Koffield had gained a lot of points with Raenau simply by understanding what to do, and because he appreciated the dubious pleasure of inhaling toxic fumes. Just as with making the floor vanish, the cigars had been a test. Of what, exactly, Norla was not sure—but it was clear that Koffield had passed with flying colors.

“I don’t wish to be rude,” Norla lied. She damned well did want to be rude, to both of them. “But you did wish to see us urgently, and we have traveled quite a long way to get here, on what Admiral Koffield said he thought were important matters. Perhaps we could begin?”

“You’re right,” said Raenau. “Let’s get on with it, and get that agenda cleared. I guess I just wanted to enjoy the moment, now that you two finally made it on in. I don’t know if you two realize it, but this moment, right now, marks the end of a mystery that’s lived on for a very long time. And I get to be the one who hears the answer first.”

“I’ve afraid we’ve got some bad news on that score, Commander Raenau,” Koffield replied. “When we left her, no one aboard the Dom Pedro IV had any idea what went wrong, or how the ship malfunctioned. Nor do we understand how she could have made it here at all.”

“No, no, you misunderstand me,” Raenau said. “What made your ship malfunction isn’t the mystery I care about, though others do. You’re the mystery that interests me. You, and the message we think you sent.”

“What’s so special about us?” asked Chamdray. “We were aboard a ship that never arrived, and we’re certainly not the first ship that’s happened to.”

“True enough.” Raenau shrugged. “There’s no one good reason I can give you for it. Some cases get famous, and others don’t. Something is strange enough, or bizarre enough, to seize the imagination. People invent conspiracies, or concoct explanations. There’s a strange detail that intrigues someone. A rumor, a story, takes on a life of its own. Something gets blown out of proportion. Probably the Chrononaut VI never coming back, and because Pulvrick died before she could deal with the message. Anyway, there’s a whole legend—a whole series of legends—that’s grown up around the loss of the Dom Pedro IV.”

“So we’re famous?” Norla asked, amused by the idea.

Raenau hesitated, obviously not quite sure how to reply.

Koffield spoke into the silence. “Give it to us straight, Commander. Don’t be polite about it. We need information more than courtesy. If we’re supposed to be monsters with ten-centimeter fangs, tell us.”

Raenau looked at Koffield in mild surprise. “Strange that being notorious is what you thought of first. Do you have a guilty conscience?”

Norla would have been fascinated to hear his answer to that question, but Koffield did not reply.

Their host laughed and went on. “Well, who doesn’t have something to feel guilty about? But I can tell you it’s nothing like that. Well, maybe with some people, the Glister refugees’ descendants, it is, but never mind that.”

Norla was more than a little taken aback to hear Raenau mention Glister, but Koffield revealed nothing. She wanted to take the bait, and there was something in Raenau’s expression that told her he wanted to be asked, but now was not the time or place. There were other things they needed to know about. “Let’s just stick to the point, Commander,” she said. “We don’t know much of anything. What is it you’re trying to say? Who’s Pulvrick, and what about the Chrononaut?”

“Of course. You don’t know it. My apologies. Short and sweet: The disappearance of the Dom Pedro IV used to be well-known. It isn’t really, these days. You’re not famous anymore. These days, you’re part of an old story that most people know just a little bit about. People know there’s a legend, or a mystery, but they don’t know exactly what it is. Things have gotten mixed up and forgotten. I’m sure your arrival will spark a new flurry of interest, but I’ve dug around in the records enough to know that the versions of the story best known to the general public are way off the mark. I had to do a lot of homework before I understood the situation well enough to suit myself.”

Koffield smiled. “You make it sound as if you’ve been expecting us for some time.”

“That’s a fact,” Raenau said. “I have been. I’m one of those guys who has to know things. And you people have been driving me nuts every day since I took on this job. And every other poor bastard who ever held this job. You’ve been staring us all in the face.”

“How could that be?” Norla demanded.

Raenau flipped open a panel on his desk and punched a few buttons. The image of swimming fish on the decorative folding screen by his desk vanished, the screen went black, and the upper half of the unit flashed up a text display instead.

“My daily agenda,” Raenau said. “First item.”

But Norla didn’t need to have her attention drawn to it. It jumped out at her. All the other items on the screen were in normal-sized black or dark blue lettering. But the first item was displayed in bright red letters twice as tall as everything else. Even the shape of the letters for that first item was different. Everything else was in the same sort of ornate, fussy-looking type she had seen on most of the signs and placards around the station. But the first item was in the thick, blocky, simplified style of lettering they used aboard the Dom Pedro IV and the Cruzeiro do Sul. It read:

[EARTHSIDE STANDARD DATECODE 05FEB5213] TOP PRIORITY, PERMANENT STANDING ORDER, TO BE POSTED UNTIL COMPLIANCE: BE ON ALERT FOR ARRIVAL OF TIMESHAFT SHIP DOM PEDRO VI. ANY PASSENGERS ARRIVING FROM THAT SHIP TO BE CONDUCTED TO STATION MANAGER’S OFFICE’ AT EARLIEST CONVENIENCE. IF ANTON KOFFIELD ARRIVES, CONDUCT HIM AT ONCE TO MANAGER’S OFFICE AND ALERT MANAGER REGARDLESS OF TIME OR CIRCUMSTANCE. ATTACHED FILE WILL DECRYPT AT THAT TIME.

It struck Norla at once that the syntax of the instruction was relatively normal. Everything else on the board was in the same odd compuspeak Sparten had used.

“ ‘Posted until compliance,’ “ Raenau said. “I’ve been staring at those words since I took this job. So has every man or woman who’s run this station since it was posted. Praise be, the great day dawns at last!”

“You couldn’t erase the message?” she asked.

“Nope,” said Raenau. “The station manager of the time, a woman by the name of Pulvrick, saw to that. I couldn’t even change the typo and make it Dom Pedro IV instead of Dom Pedro VI. Probably they got it mixed up with the Chrononaut VI.”

“Wait a second,” Norla said. “Back up a little. We know something about the Chrononaut, but none of the rest of it.”

“Sorry. I keep assuming you’d know this stuff, because it’s all about you. Three days after the Chrononaut VI arrived in-system, Pulvrick told the station’s artificial-intelligence system to burn that message”—he stabbed at the screen with his cigar—”into the station’s core-memory systems. And every station manager since has had to see it every day.”

“So why couldn’t you just get rid of the message—or the system running it?” Norla asked.

“Because I don’t really run this station,” Raenau said. “The station artificial-intelligence system does that. Has to be that way with a system as big as this station. The complexity of the station operation systems approach that of a human body. You can’t yank out the brain and plug in a new one. You have to leave some systems running while you upgrade others. Backups in every subsystem, every sort of redundancy. I looked into it. There have been at least six replacements and fourteen major upgrades of the station’s artificial-intelligence system in the last century. And every generation of the station Artlnt has made sure that damned message popped to the top of the screen on the manager’s schedule, no matter what.”

“Pulvrick must have thought we had something important to say,” Koffield said mildly.

“People have wondered about that, from time to time,” Raenau admitted. “It was all the rage when the Glister refugees came in, back before I was born, and when I was just a kid. Not much anymore these days, of course, but there used to be a lot of theories floated about. It’s always been assumed that the Chrononaut was carrying some sort of message from you, saying you were working on something big, or had vital news, or whatever, but no one’s ever seen the message. That’s what got people guessing. There were whole books just on that one subject, as a matter of fact. Have a look in the archives when you have a chance, if you’re interested.” Raenau grinned suddenly. “But I guess you know if there was a message, huh? I guess you don’t have to read up on it.”

Koffield looked intently at Raenau. “It’s been assumed that I sent a message on the Chrononaut? Why assumed? How is it they didn’t know? And if they didn’t know, why did they speculate?”

Raenau pointed a beefy finger at the message display. “Because of that. ‘Attached file will decrypt.’ It was posted three days after the Chrononaufs arrival, and there’s an encrypted file linked to it. Because of that, and because the message mentions you in particular, it’s always been assumed that what Pulvrick had linked to that command was a message from you. People have tried to find it and crack it now and then, but the station’s Artint was under orders to protect the message, and it always found ways to do it. Even the message’s location in the memory storage system is encrypted.”

“I did indeed send a message on the Chrononaut to the station manager—addressed to the office, as I had no idea who had the job. I never intended it to be kept secret,” Koffield said. “Pulvrick should have unbuttoned the message once we were badly overdue.”

“Right,” said Raenau. “Except by then she was busy being dead. A bad virus ripped through the station, killed lots of people—including Pulvrick and most of her staff. And the Chrononaut VI never passed through the Solacian system again. It was years before anyone thought to track her down. She’d been sold for scrap by then, and the crew dispersed all over Settled Space. Just finding out that much took years. They traced one or two of the crew, but none of them knew anything. The captain was the one to talk to, but searching took a lot of time and money, and after a while, people gave up looking for him.”

Koffield was staring straight at Raenau, and yet did not seem to see him at all. “Do you mean to say no one knows, no one in this star system has ever known, except this Pulvrick person, what was in my message?”

“Nope.”

“For a hundred and twenty-seven years it’s been in the station Artlnt’s memory store, waiting for me to show up?”

“That’s right. At least we think so. We think that when we give the Artint positive confirmation of your identity, it will deliver up the message. But we don’t know for certain.”

Koffield was plainly stunned. Of all the possibilities he had considered, this was clearly not one of them. “Then you don’t know,” he said. “You don’t know.”

“No, we don’t,” Raenau said. “And, well, I don’t mean to be too hard-edged* but you two are quite literally history. Maybe that hasn’t sunk in yet. Maybe your information was vital a hundred years ago, but, now, well—you’re too late. The historians will want to talk with you, and I want to know myself, but, well—a long time has passed.”

“If we’re so unimportant, why did you bring us directly here?” Norla asked, a little belligerently.

“Didn’t have much choice. Once your ship was identified as a lighter off the Dom Pedro IV, the station Artlnt systems started firing up every sort of alarm it had, insisting on compliance with its standing orders. Mind you, I was happy to cooperate. I want that message gone and my schedule board clear. Sick to death of staring at those big red words every morning. So—can we get you identified and get this over with?”

Norla was about to protest further when Koffield caught her eye and shook his head. “What we have to say, and what was in the message, are still quite important, Commander. Once you decrypt that message, and once I open this secured container, we’ll prove that much.”

“Hmmph. I suppose I have to admire your confidence, anyway. Lemme get the Artlnt into voice mode, and we’ll get this done.” He worked another of the controls hidden in his desktop.

A dull, expressionless, genderless voice spoke, coming from nowhere and everywhere in the room. “Voice mode, command systems, activated,” it announced.

“I hate talking to this damned thing,” Raenau growled. “Feel like I’m talking backwards to a smart-ass assistant who wants to show he’s smarter than I am.” He cleared his throat and spoke with exaggerated care. “Command Artlnt, receive command. Identity test, subject, seated in chair two. Compare results, standing orders, action list, item one, station manager schedule. Proceed.”

“Subject, seated in chair two, state name, state personal identity phrase.”

“Anton Koffield. *I warn of things to come.’ “

“Match, preliminary, formed. Stand by.”

One of the ceiling portals, a different one than the one the elevator had used, irised open. A small wheeled equipment cart, held by a hydraulic arm, came down into the commander’s office. The arm set the cart down and released it. It rolled toward Koffield and stopped in front of him.”Fingerprint, blood sample, for DNA extraction, retinal scan,” the dull voice announced. “Scanner-sampler active. Indicated slot, insert hand into, palm down.” Koffield put his hand into the slot with far greater apparent willingness than Norla would have shown. She could see him flinch slightly, no doubt as the sampling needle drew its blood from a fingertip. “Hand to be withdrawn. Subject to stand by.”

A second slot opened in the top of the cart, and a scanner mask raised itself up and out on the end of a telescoping arm. It positioned itself at eye level, a few. centimeters from Koffield’s head. “Face, press up against mask, eyes, align with scanners. Eyes open, looking straight ahead.” Koffield obligingly leaned in close to the mask and pressed his face up against it. “Complete,” the voice announced. “Identity, subject, established as Koffield, Anton. Standing orders, action list, item one, schedule, commander compared. Action, required, execute.”

The cart withdrew. The arm came back down out of the ceiling, picked it back up, and withdrew. The ceiling port irised shut.

“It’s gone,” Raenau said, in a tone of wonderment and delight. “It’s actually gone away.”

He was, of course, looking toward the screen, and at the big blank space where the old-fashioned red letters had been for so long. The space on the screen was empty, and on Raenau’s pugnacious face was the expression of someone who had just witnessed a miracle.

“Is the file there?” Koffield asked. “Did it decrypt the file?”

“Huh?” Raenau said, still all but transfixed by the sight of the message that wasn’t there.

“The file. Has the Artlnt system released the decrypted file?” Koffield demanded. He was suddenly more alert, more animated than he had been a moment before.

“Oh! Yeah. Right.” Raenau activated another screen, built into .the top of his desk. “It’s just coming in. Hell’s bells, that thing must have been coded to the devil and back if it’s taking this long to put it in clear.”

“Very good,” Koffield said. “What it says should match up with the files in here,” he said, patting the secured container.

This is it, Norla told herself. Koffield needed that file to be there first, read first, before he could go further. If Raenau could match the encrypted file that had waited here all this time against the information Koffield delivered now, that would be prima facie evidence of the information’s authenticity. No one would ever be able to claim it was planted or faked. Now he was ready. Now Koffield had come tothe end of his long, long road. She could read it all in his face. A century late, perhaps, but now, at last, he was about to fulfill his self-appointed mission.

Koffield lifted the secured container up onto Raenau’s desk, moving eagerly, hurriedly, nearly knocking over the ashtray that held his forgotten cigar. “The data in this secured container here will match what’s in your file,” he said. “Each will help prove the other is authentic.”

“Hey! Careful you don’t scratch my desk with that thing,” Raenau warned, getting up out of his chair.

We’re here to warn about the end of the world, and he’s worried about his desktop. Norla found that she had to fight back a half-hysterical giggle.

“Your desk is perfectly safe, Commander,” Koffield said with something close to sharp impatience. “It’s your planet that is in danger. You need to examine the information in the file you have just decrypted, and the information I have in this container.”

“Now wait a minute—”

“There is a two-page summary at the start of my message brought to you by the Chrononaut VI. Read it.”

“I have got better things to do than—”

“My rank might be a hundred years out of date, but I am your superior officer. Read it. Now!”

Raenau stared at Koffield, and time froze for the space of a dozen heartbeats. Then, slowly, Raenau sat back down, stubbed his cigar out in the ashtray, and brought up the file on the display built into his desk. Norla watched him intently. It wasn’t far from her mind that there were any number of ways for him to pull a stunt, to push a panic button and have armed guards drop out of the ceiling. But he did not. He sat, and he read, the glow of the display screen softly illuminating his expressionless face.

The room was silent, utterly still. Norla found herself holding her breath without knowing why. She forced herself to start breathing again. She stared at the station commander’s face.

But Raenau was giving very little away. He frowned at one point and seemed to look back at something earlier on in the text before going forward.

At last he finished and shut off the screen. He sat there for perhaps half a minute, frowning down at the blank top of his desk. At last he spoke, still staring down at nothing at all. “My first instinct is to throw you both out of my office and have you locked away as a pair of lunatics,” he said. “Your summary, Admiral Koffield, reads like a carefully reasoned, thoughtfully worked-out, hundred-year-old list of paranoid delusions and apocalyptic claptrap. I’m very much surprised Pulvrick took it seriously at all.” He let out a weary sigh, then looked up at them. “Trouble is, everything predicted in your summary has come true. That makes it harder for me to think you’re crazy. Not impossible. Just harder.”

“Let me make it harder still,” Koffield said. “Open this secured container, and then the case inside it. First detach the longwatch camera, and aim it so it can see what you’re doing.”

“This is what you do to help prove you aren’t crazy?” Raenau asked. He glared at the impassive Koffield for a second, then shrugged. “All right. I’ll go along with the gag. Quickest way to get this over with is to get this thing open and you out of here.” He looked down at the secured container, saw how the longwatch camera was fastened, and removed it. He set it down on the opposite side of his desk so it would have a clear view of the proceedings, then turned his attention back to the secured container. “So how’s this thing work? Not quite like what we’ve got these days.”

“It’s an open-once system,” Koffield said. “Opening the main latches destroys the locking mechanism, so it can’t be resealed. I believe there’s a printed label by the latches, with instructions there.”

“Ah, where—oh, okay, there it is.” Raenau read over the instructions, then opened the seals and the latches, one by one. The container came open. He swung the lid open and revealed Koffield’s personal pack, his Chronologic-Patrol-issue travel case. Raenau lifted it out, set it down on his desk, then took the now-empty secured container off his desk and put it on the floor. Norla could not help wondering if Raenau simply wanted more room to work, or if he was still concerned about marring the surface of his precious desk.

Koffield was visibly restraining himself, holding back from grabbing the travel case and opening it himself. But it would make infinitely more sense for Raenau to do the job. Koffield had done so much already to avoid any chance for trickery that it would be foolish to invent chances now. So long as he did not touch the travel case, there was no way anyone could ever invent a story about Koffield using some sort of sleight of hand to plant a newly written “prediction” of what had happened in the last hundred and twenty-seven years.

“Go ahead,” Koffield said, his voice eager, his eyes bright, “Open it. Open it.”

Norla stared at Anton Koffield, and for once the man was understandable. She could read his thoughts and feelings as clearly as if they were up on Raenau’s display screen. It was the moment he had worked toward all along. Once his report was delivered to a high local official, and in such a way that no one could ever charge fraud, then the worst of the battle would be over.

“All right, all right,” Raenau said. “I’m opening it.” He broke the sealers on the personal pack, undid the latches, swung open the lid, and stared down at the contents.

The room was deathly silent for a time that could have been a single moment or a lifetime.

“Is this some kind of joke?” Raenau demanded. “Because I’ve got a station in crisis here. I’ve got no goddamned time for jokes and games.”

Norla could see the age-faded, rust-stained interior padding in the case, and the carefully carved-out niches in the padding that had been meant to hold books and data-blocks.

But there were no datablocks, no books. Nothing but a melted, compressed-together, crumbly lump of ancient waste plastic and corroded scrap metal, no doubt put in the case to mimic the weight of the things taken out.

The report, the data files, the warning were gone, as lost as all the tens of thousands of yesterdays that had died since Anton Koffield had last closed his travel case.