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shift of infalling light and the fact that some of them were changing frequency slowly and seem to have changed rather a lot. Our best estimate is eight hundred thousand years, plus or minus two hundred thousand. That’s about four times as long as our species has existed, gentlemen. We’re fossils, an archaeology experiment or something. Our relevance to our abductors is not as equals, but as subjects in some kind of vast experiment. And what the purpose of the experiment is, I can’t tell you. I’ve got some guesses, but . . .”
    Sagan shrugs, then lapses into silence. Gregor catches Brundle’s eye, and Brundle shakes his head very slightly. Don’t spill the beans. Gregor nods. Sagan may realize he’s in a room with a CIA spook and an East German defector, but he doesn’t need to know about the Alienation Service yet.
    “Well, that’s as may be,” says Fox, dropping words like stones into the hollow silence at the table. “But it begs the question: what are we going to tell the DCI?”
    “I suggest,” says Gregor, “that we start by reviewing COLLECTION RUBY.” He nods at Sagan. “Then, maybe when we’re all up to speed on that , we’ll have a better idea of whether there’s anything useful we can tell the DCI.”

CANNON FODDER
    Madeleine and Robert Holbright are among the last of the immi grants to disembark on the new world. As she glances back at the brilliant white side of the liner, the horizon seems to roll around her head, settling into a strange new stasis that feels unnatural after almost six months at sea.
    New Iowa isn’t flat and it isn’t new: rampart cliffs loom to either side of the unnaturally deep harbor (gouged out of bedrock courtesy of General Atomics). A cog-driven funicular railway hauls Maddy and Robert and their four shipping trunks up the thousand-foot climb to the plateau and the port city of Fort Eisenhower—and then to the arrival and orientation camp.
    Maddy is quiet and withdrawn, but Bob, oblivious, natters constantly about opportunities and jobs and grabbing a plot of land to build a house on. “It’s the new world,” he says at one point. “Why aren’t you excited?”
    “The new world,” Maddy echoes, biting back the urge to say something cutting. She looks out the window as the train climbs the cliff face and brings them into sight of the city. City is the wrong word: it implies solidity, permanence. Fort Eisenhower is less than five years old, a leukemic gash inflicted on the landscape by the Corps of Engineers. The tallest building is the governor’s mansion, at three stories. Architecturally, the tone is Wild West meets the Radar Age, raw pine houses contrasting with big grey concrete boxes full of seaward-pointing Patriot missiles to deter the inevitable encroachment of the communist hordes. “It’s so flat .”
    “The nearest hills are two hundred miles away, past the coastal plain—didn’t you read the map?”
    She ignores his little dig as the train squeals and clanks up the side of the cliff. It wheezes asthmatically to a stop beside a wooden platform and expires in a belch of saturated steam. An hour later they’re weary and sweated-up in the lobby of an unprepossessing barrack hall made of raw plywood. There’s a large hall and a row of tables and a bunch of bored-looking colonial service types, and people are walking from one position to another with bundles of papers, answering questions in low voices and receiving official stamps. The would-be colonists mill around like disturbed livestock among the piles of luggage at the back of the room. Maddy and Robert queue uneasily in the damp afternoon heat, overhearing snippets of conversation. “Country of origin? Educational qualifications? Yes, but what was your last job?” Religion and race—almost a quarter of the people in the hall are refugees from India or Pakistan or somewhere lost to the mysterious east forever—seem to obsess the officials. “Robert?” she whispers.
    “It’ll be