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said.
    "What?"
    "Before I remember whatever it was I forgot to have you do. And get everyone else out of here, too. Just once I want you all home at a decent hour. Have dinner with your husband, if you still have a husband."
    She looked at him incredulously. "Are you going home, too?"
    "As soon as I review these reports with Ken. Now, go." After a quick glance at the reports, Jonders tossed them into a folder and took the elevator to the third floor. Fogelbee's secretary was gone for the day, so Jonders walked straight through the outer office to Fogelbee's half-open door. He rapped and peered in. Fogelbee looked up from the phone and gestured for him to wait outside. Jonders pulled the door almost closed and sat and began reading the summaries in detail.
    He gradually became aware of Fogelbee's voice drifting out. "Tracking from Tachylab . . . they say it's more than a million kilometers closer than expected . . . no, no explanation . . ." Jonders's ears prickled. Was that Father Sky they were talking about? he wondered. Fogelbee's voice became softer. "I wonder . . . reliability of tracking . . . transmit sooner?" His voice became inaudible; perhaps he was conscious of Jonders's presence nearby.
    Damn it, anyway, Jonders thought. Whatever Fogelbee was talking about was probably something that he ought to be privy to, as well, except that the "need to know" principle was so almighty around here. It griped him that a man was supposed to do his best work on the project without being given information that would help him do so. He had complained before, but to no avail.
    Fogelbee came out, a tall, hawk-nosed man with thinning hair. "Your answer on the transmission date," he said, "is the distance to the receiver and signal-to-noise ratio. The twenty-fourth is our limit, if we're to have a safety margin. Come on in."
    Jonders followed Fogelbee into the office. "I couldn't help overhearing—something about the target being closer than expected?"
    Fogelbee turned. "Whatever you may have heard was private," he said, a bit roughly. "In any case, you probably misunderstood."
    Jonders raised his eyebrows.
    "That's all you really need to know," Fogelbee added brusquely.
    Maybe yes, maybe no, Jonders thought. "You'd think that they would have figured out the signal requirements well in advance," he said, "instead of making all these last-minute adjustments."
    Fogelbee shrugged. "No one's ever done this before. Sometimes you don't know these things until you get a craft out there and try it. Now, what do you have for me?"
    Jonders opened the folder on Fogelbee's desk. "Better news than I'd expected," he said.

Chapter 5
    The landscape spun by, a blur of fading greens and browns. Mozy's spirits soared among the clouds, among the striated patches of mist that glowed crimson against the sky's deepening blue.
    Her mood had been completely turned around by the scenario, featuring Kadin, a host of aliens, and her—Kadin bargaining for her life, using diplomatic skills a professional would have admired. The aliens had been willowy creatures—tall, swaying, murmuring mystics by whose laws there was no wrong in taking a single Earth woman captive, to witness her spiritual powers in life and in death. Kadin had challenged them—persuading them of the wrongness, in human spiritual terms, of killing, and of abusing human spirituality as a means of studying it. In the end, they had relented.
    Mozy had never admired or loved him more, and not just because he'd saved her "life" in that scenario. It was his courage and sensitivity she admired, his use of reason and compassion, even when force had been available as an alternative.
    She stared out the window as the monorail sped toward New Phoenix, watching the upside-down plains and valleys in the clouds shifting slowly with the winds and the changing light of the setting sun. She imagined pink sand dunes rolling down to the upside-down, azure sea of the open sky. She imagined herself