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newsers will cut us to pieces when they learn we’ve been holding out on them.”
    “That can’t be helped. Do you have any conception of what it will do to the body politic if they start going to bed every night afraid they’ll wake up dead in the morning?”
    “I think you are exaggerating, Madam Coordinator.”
    “I wish I were, Anton. You should read more. The surest way to bring about psychosis in the human animal is to give him something to fear that he does not understand. I can cite you chapter and verse from history if you like.”
    Nadine Halstrom had begun her career as a professor of history and had only gotten into politics through a fortuitous series of accidents. Her field of specialization had been the ultra-violent twentieth century. In many ways, that century had been an aberration, a detour into mindless destructiveness. It had been an era when the question of national survival had turned logic on its ear. How else to explain the fifty-year stalemate that had dominated much of the last half of history’s bloodiest century? Eastern and western power blocs had both threatened to annihilate their foes if attacked, all the while professing their devotion to the cause of peace. For more than two generations, people had lived in fear of death raining down from the skies and it had warped them. To think that the same thing could happen in her century sent a shiver up her spine that had nothing to do with the temperature.
    “Very well,” Bartok replied, “we’ll keep the alien a secret.”
    “How do you propose to do that, Anton?”
    Despite the lightness of her tone, it was obvious to the survey director that his job might well hinge on his answer. He considered the problem for a few seconds while alternately puffing out his cheeks and sucking them back in. It was a mannerism of which he was totally unaware.
    “Standard procedure calls for holding the alien in quarantine aboard High Station until the biologists can clear him. Obviously, we cannot do that. High Station is too public for a secret of this magnitude to last very long.”
    “You aren’t suggesting that we break quarantine!”
    “No, of course not. What we need is someplace out of the way where we can perform the necessary tests, somewhere we are able to control access.”
    “Any suggestions?”
    “What about PoleStar? The weather directorate owns it outright and there is virtually no traffic to and from the habitat.”
    Nadine Halstrom looked pensive, and then flashed a smile familiar to billions of holovision viewers.
    “Hmmm, not bad ... not bad, at all! It is remote and in a conveniently difficult orbit for everything in the equatorial plane. I will see to it that the weather directorate cooperates. What problems are there in turning it into a base of operations?”
    “We’ll need to duplicate High Station’s laboratory facilities, of course, and man them with specialists. If we start moving people and equipment from High Station, someone will talk.”
    “Then we don’t do it. You can use Magellan ’s specialists for most things. Those extra scientists we need, we will recruit here on Earth. Same with the equipment. That way no one will have enough view of the full picture to realize what is going on. To further obscure things, have Magellan ’s flight plan pulled from the Sky Watch computer. We may not be able to obscure the fact that the ship is home, but by God, we can make it difficult for anyone trying to find it.”
    Bartok scribbled a note on the face of his pocket computer before continuing. “Then there is the problem of the people who were killed. We’ve notified their next of kin.”
    “Any problems?”
    “The families are in shock at the moment. I think we can handle them well enough if they start to ask too many questions. The scout pilot was independently wealthy. So is her brother. He is at headquarters right now making inquiries into how his sister died.”
    “I suppose you have arranged a plausible