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same goals? I hear the origins of their agenda in your words—it’s all there. But is what they want what you wanted? I believe you truly meant to lift us up, but what they do promises to drag us down—
    Tipping back his head, Wells drained the tall glass of ice water, then refilled it and drank half. As he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, he noted the clock and was surprised to see that it read 20:40.
    Returning to his seat, Wells viewed one last time the seven-and-a-half-minute unnarrated clip of the Ba’ar Tell FFI exercise. The first edit had been too slick, too theatrical—too patently intended to end all debate over the Defender’s effectiveness. This one, the third, was better: the overview of the Defender system and strategy he had ordered added at the beginning made everything that followed more effective.
    “Save,” Wells said. “File to Wells, Defense Archives, Committee Chamber. Level One voice-lock.”
    “Done,” replied the terminal.
    Now—what else needs my attention before I leave? He ran through a mental list as precise and complete as if it had been written down and came up with only one item: Farlad’s new Thackery document. I’ll give it ten minutes , Wells thought. That probably will be enough .
    But first he touched the com key. “Ronina.”
    The terminal needed no more guidance than that. On its own it quickly sought out her com address from his directory and placed the call. When she came on, her voice contained a gratifying note of surprise and pleasure. “Mack—how nice. I’ve been hoping you hadn’t crossed me off your list.”
    That was one of Ronina’s few unattractive features—her propensity for prompting him for reassurance, for setting him up to offer some verbal endorsement of her status. As he usually did, he ignored the cue. “I’ll be done here in a little while—”
    “I’ll take that as an invitation,” she purred. “Do you want to come here or should I go up to your apartment?”
    “Mine, I think.”
    “I’ll be waiting for you—and thinking wicked thoughts.”
    Then, clearing the screen of his notes for the next day’s presentation, Wells called up his private files, an act that required voice-password and retinal identification. There was a brief pause as the decryptor failed to keep pace with the system’s file retrieval speed, and then the menu popped up on the screen.
    The file was named, unambiguously, MERRITT THACKERY. Shortly after becoming Director of Defense, Wells had begun a search of Service records for any and all anecdotal accounts by Thackery of his encounter with the D’shanna he called Gabriel and of what Thackery saw while on the spindle.
    There turned out to be hundreds of such documents. It was impossible to believe that anyone anywhere had ever been more intensively interviewed and debriefed than had Thackery after his return from the spindle. There were literally thou sands of hours of interviews: normal, under time-expansion hypnosis, and using endorphin memory-enhancement therapy.
    Had Service physicians known how to dissect Thackery’s brain and suck out the memories directly, Wells did not think they would have hesitated to do so.
    The documents told Wells what every schoolchild knew, and little more. Then in the drive core of the shattered Survey ship Dove , Gabriel had reached out from the spindle and taken Thackery back with him across the barrier. That from the vantage of the energy matrix of the spindle, Gabriel showed Thackery the echoes of the ice-age Earth-based civilization that had founded the heretofore inexplicable human colonies.
    Traveling downtime on the spindle, Thackery witnessed the Mizari’s savage attack on the Weichsel civilization. He learned the danger that awaited in the Ursa Major cluster, and he brought that warning back to the matter-matrix, once thought the only reality. And in doing so he had become the best-known personage in human history. Thackery’s miraculous translocation