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went out, locking the door of his room behind him, and took the ramp down to the ground floor of the house, which was already noisy with the voices of the guests gathered in the main sitting room. Tibur had brought him a printout list of those invited, with pictures opposite the names, and he had made an effort to memorize these, but there was no telling whether his memory might not desert him when it came to meeting the actual people. He had never been very social; and the prospect of making small talk with thirty or forty strangers who had no real reason to be interested in him, was not attractive. This dinner, after all, was obviously being given to honor and curry favor with a John Smith. If there had been any polite way to do so, Jef would have stayed in his room with Mikey.
    At the foot of the ramp he put the list in the pocket of his jacket and went into the sitting room, pausing just inside the doorway. No one there seemed to have noticed his entrance. They were involved in conversational clusters about the room. His sensitivity, heightened by solitary habits and the empathic bond he had developed with Mikey over the years, gave him a feeling of things hidden, of the ugliness of some imminent explosion waiting below the surface chatter going on in the room. Tibur was behind a table set up as a bar in one corner, and for lack of something better to do immediately, Jef went over to it.
    "And what would you like to drink, Mr. Robini?" Tibur asked.
    "Anything. What do you have in the way of beer?" Jef asked.
    "You might like to try our Everon City ale."
    "Fine," said Jef. "Thanks."
    He accepted a tall glass of a bitter malt beverage with a thick head of foam. Sipping it, he turned to look the room over again.
    What was most noticeable about the people assembled there was that they could hardly have been told from a similar group at cocktails back on Earth. The interesting reason for this was that here, light years from Earth, most of these colonists were wearing the latest in Earth styles and fashions. On a world this recently planted, this could happen only in two ways. One would have been if all the individuals in the room had been back to Earth in the last year or so, and had a chance to update their wardrobes while they were there. Another would have been the existence of a black market, or at least a grey one, in late-fashion clothes that were being imported instead of the customary equipment and other supplies. Earth did not care what it shipped out to new worlds like this; but Jef would have expected that somewhere outside this room there were colonists who cared more for improving their planet than for the latest fashions.
    Beyond the fact that those here were, as a group, dressed in style—and not inexpensively so—their common denominator seemed to be an age level running from the late twenties to the late forties. Men and women both—and their number seemed about equally divided as to sex—they had a sort of capable, almost brutal, look. Perhaps, thought Jef, watching from the drink table, this was only natural, seeing the jobs they held. The guest list he had been given had read like a catalogue of the people controlling Everon. There might be individuals important on this world who were not here this evening. Certainly there were none here who were not important.
    Clearly, however, the one who outranked them all was Martin. Unlike Jef, who would have preferred to go unnoticed all evening, Martin seemed to be enjoying the attention he was getting. Some of it barely stopped short of fawning, yet Martin appeared to be taking it all at face value. They're making a fool of him, thought Jef, and his inner sad bitterness stirred at the observation. He also noticed, as he assumed Martin had not, how the whole gathering was quietly being orchestrated by the Constable who moved soft-footedly and continually among the guests, putting in a comment here, a laugh there.
    Martin was at the center of a little knot of six