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tell whether that was
Emissary
passing through?” Hancock frowned again. “Your deception of the Astronautical Control Board about the true purpose of that vessel could affect the continuance of your licenses, you know.”
    Brodersen had awaited that line of attack. “Aurie,” he sighed elaborately, “let me just rehearse for you exactly what happened.”
    He struck fire to his pipe and got it under weigh. His glance roved. The room and furniture were to his taste, little of synth about them, mostly handmade of what materials were handy some seventy years ago, when the settlement on Demeter was about a generation old.
(That’d be half an Earth century,
flitted across his mind. I
really have soaked this planet up into me, haven’t I?)
Creamy, whorl-grained daphne wainscoting set off a vase of sunbloom on the desk and, on a shelf behind, a stunning hologram of Mount Lorn with both moons full above its snows. On his right, two windows stood open on a garden. There Terrestrial rosebuds and grass reached to a wrought iron fence; but a huge old thunder oak remained from the vanished forest, its bluish-green leaves breathing forth a slight gingery odor, and slingplant grew jubilantly over the metal. Ordinary traffic moved along the street, pedestrians, cyclists, bubble of a car and snake of a freighter whirring on their air cushions. Across the way, a modern house lifted its pastel trapezoid. Yet overhead the sky arched deeper blue than anywhere on Earth, and Phoebus in afternoon had a mellowness akin to Sol at evening. For a half second he recalled that barometric pressure was lower and so was gravity (eighty percent), but his body was too habituated to feel either any longer.
    He drew on the pipe, savored a bite across tongue and nostrils, and continued: “I never kept my opinion secret. Theory says a T machine can scoot you to anywhere in space-time within its range… which means space
and
time.
Emissary
was on the track of an alien ship that’d been observed using a gate in this system, obviously to pass between a couple of points we knew nothing about. I figured the crew and owners ’ud be friendly. Why shouldn’t they be? At a minimum, they’d help
Emissary
return after her mission was completed. And in that case, why not send them home close to the same date as they left?”
    “I’ve heard your argument,” Hancock said, “but only after you began agitating. If you felt it was that plausible, that important, why didn’t you file a report beforehand with the appropriate bureau?”
    Brodersen shrugged. “Why should I? The idea wasn’t absolutely unique to me. Besides, I’m a private citizen.”
    She gave him a narrow look. “The wealthiest man on Demeter is not altogether a private citizen.”
    “I’m small potatoes next to the rich on Earth,” he replied blandly.
    “Like the Rueda clan in Per ú—with whom you have a businesses well as family relationship. No, you are not entirely a private citizen.”
    Still she stared at him. He sat back, cradling the warmth of his pipe bowl, and let her. Not that he had illusions about his handsomeness. He was a big man, a hundred and eighty-eight centimeters tall and thickboned, muscular, broad in the shoulders, deep in the chest; but of late years he had added girth till he appeared stocky. His head was likewise massive, mesocephalic, square-faced, with heavy jaw and mouth, jutting Roman nose, eyes gray, wideset, downward-slanted, crow’s-footed, skin weathered and furrowed. Like most men on Demeter, he went clean-shaven and cropped his hair above the ears; it was straight, coarse, black with some white streaks, a last inheritance from his great-grandmother. For this meeting, as for most occasions, he wore casual colonial male garb: bolero of orosaur leather above a loose blouse, baggy pants tucked into soft half boots, wide belt holding assorted small tools and instruments in its loops plus a sheath knife.
    “Regardless,” he said, keeping his amicable tone,