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fingers.
    “Sure,” I said. “We can slip into sick bay. It’s just down the corridor and it’s always quiet when nobody’s ill.”
    There was a half-frown again, as if she didn’t think the sick bay was entirely appropriate, but she nodded. As we went out of the door I inclined my head back in the direction of the frenetic festivity.
    “Hasn’t changed much since your time, I guess?”
    “No,” she said. “That’s the most alarming thing about these last few days. Everything is so tediously familiar.”
    “Wouldn’t have been too different if it were seven hundred years ago,” I observed. “Except that we wouldn’t be on a space station and we’d have funny costumes on. Dancing and drinking are the hardy perennials of human behavior.”
    “And sex,” she added dryly.
    “Yes,” I answered. “That too.”
    “If I’d stepped out of 1744 into the twenty-first century,” she said, “I’d notice plenty of differences. But from the twenty-first to the twenty-fifth...I keep on looking, but I’m damned if I can find them.”
    I opened the door of the sick bay, and stood aside to let her go through. She looked at the beds draped with plastic curtains, and moved to the main desk. She took the chair from behind it; I borrowed one from beside the nearest bed.
    “There are reasons for that,” I said, referring to the lack of perceptible changes in the human condition.
    “So I’ve heard,” she replied.
    “What can I do for you?”
    “You can help me out with a few explanations.”
    I raised my eyebrows, signaling: Why me?
    “I’ve already tried Harmall,” she said. “I’ve also talked to your boss, Schumann. I keep getting stalled. The secretive voice of authority.”
    “What makes you think I’ll tell you anything they won’t? What makes you think I can?”
    “I daresay you can’t,” she said. “And that might be the advantage I need. If you don’t know, you have to guess—and guesses aren’t secret, are they?”
    “For the very good reason that they might not be right.”
    She shrugged. “Why won’t they let me go to Earth?” She fired the question at me like a rifle shot.
    “Maybe they need you aboard the Earth Spirit on the trip back to your brand new HSB,” I suggested. “Harmall did sort of promise us a fuller briefing on the situation as viewed from the Ariadne .”
    “There are plenty of people aboard the Ariadne who could brief you on arrival,” she said. “You’d want to look over the data yourselves, anyhow. I wasn’t planning to go back; I was planning to carry the news all the way home. And I was planning to do my talking to a lot more people—and a lot more important people—than Jason Harmall. As things stand, I don’t even know if anyone on Earth even knows that the Ariadne reached her target.”
    “They’ll know,” I assured her. “They just might not want it to become common knowledge. Information control.”
    “That,” she said, “is what needs explaining. You’re telling me that the finding of Naxos isn’t going to be publicized—that the whole affair is going to be handled in secret by a select group of politicians and scientists?”
    “That’s right,” I told her. “Does that surprise you?”
    “Not really,” she answered, with the ghost of a sigh. “But I was rather hoping that I might be surprised, if you see what I mean.”
    I nodded.
    “Tediously familiar,” she said. “Every way I turn. There’s still a Soviet bloc, I hear, and they’re still ‘they’ while we’re ‘us.’ I really do find that very hard to swallow, after all this time. It seems as though the whole solar system has been in suspended animation, right along with me.”
    I found a paper clip, and began studiously unwinding it. Rumor has it that paper clips go all the way back to the days of the Roman Empire, except that there wasn’t any paper then. Parchment clips, I suppose they’d be. Similar in design, anyhow.
    “Not far wrong, I suppose,” I told