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webbed swimming feet, demanding admittance. Royce got up and let the bumbler in. “Whonk-ka-whonk, ka-whonkl” the big brown bird opined as he followed Royce back to the lounger and stood beside it for his head to be scratched.
    Royce laughed as the bumbler cocked his head at him solemnly. “You’ve got a point, Jocko,” he admitted. And I told Carlotta she was overreacting? he thought Nothing’s really happened yet. Surely we can handle these clowns.
    Still, it behooved him to know something more about what was speeding toward Pacifica than a few stale jokes and the bilge that the Femocrats and Transcendental Scientists put out on the Web.
    He called up the basic briefing tape on Transcendental Science from the accessbanks. “Transcendental Science is a philosophy, a technology, and one of only two human transtellar political entities,” a female voice said as the Transcendental Science ensign, a four-pointed silver star, appeared on the access screen. “Some contend that it is also an ideological religion.” The image of a middle-aged man with short blond hair appeared on the screen; there was something vaguely unsettling about his intense blue eyes. “The movement was founded two hundred and fifty years ago by Dr. Heinz Shockley who established a colony on the fourth planet of the Tau Ceti system. Citizenship was open only to scientists who passed a rigorous screening and their immediate families. Shockley’s basic philosophy is still the reason detre of Transcendental Science today....”
    Shockley began to speak in a deep, urbane, almost syrupy voice. “We are living at the end of human prehistory. Though we travel haltingly from star to star, communicate instantly across the light-years, and have unlocked the secrets of the stellar phoenix, we are still circumscribed by the universal parameters of matter, energy, time, and mind. Science is our method for understanding those parameters and maximizing our mastery of the universe within them. But this is prehistory. Homo galacticus, true star-roving man, must learn to transcend the so-called natural limits of the universe through a transcendental science. He must not be confined by the speed of light, or the so-called natural human lifespan, or the consciousness he evolved with. He must seize this sorry scheme of things entire and mold it totally to the heart’s desire...
    “Deep,” Royce admitted aloud. But not exactly relevant to the current problem. “Let’s have the capsule history,” he told the access computer.
    A schematic map of the human galaxy appeared on the access screen—inhabited systems represented by white dots, a single blue dot for Tau Geti. “Fifty years after the founding of the first Institute of Transcendental Science on Tau Ceti, the first Arkology, the Einstein, left the system,” a male voice said. A blue dot moved away from Tau Ceti toward the system of Ariel. “Twelve years later, the Ariel Institute of Transcendental Science was established, and ten years after that, Ariel launched its first Arkology. Meanwhile, Tau Ceti launched three more of its own.” The dot representing Ariel turned blue as the dot representing the Einstein reached it. Other dots moved off into space from Tau Ceti, then one from Ariel. “Since then, five more systems have established their own Institutes of Transcendental Science and have begun launching Arkol-ogies...” White dots began to turn blue as blue dots moved across the schematic like a swarm of insects. “Sirius, Zeus, Barnard...”
    “And so forth,” Royce muttered, stopping the tape. “Query: how many Arkologies are now in existence?” “Seventeen, plus or minus five,” the computer voice said. “This is an estimate, exact figure unknown.”
    “Query: has any system visited by an Arkology failed to establish an Institute of Transcendental Science?” “Unverifiable. Hypothesis one: answer no. Hypothesis two: Transcendental Science only releases data on its successes.”
    I’d