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rediscovered and revived. At the same time he left open the possibility that the empire—reformed and chastened—is still out there somewhere, and may return.” Andrew chuckled. “You can see why all this was so appealing. It relegated you Lokaron to the status of Johnny-come-latelys. And if the empire does come back, then the members of the Imperial Temple of the Star Lords that Gruber founded will enjoy special favor for having kept the faith. No question about it, he was a genius in his way. He died twenty years ago, but the Imperial Temple is still going strong—and, as I understand, since his death it’s been run by genuine true believers. To quote a human named P. T. Barnum—although he went to his grave denying he had ever said it—there’s a sucker born every minute.”
    “But I understand that the Imperial Temple has sponsored research into evidence of prehistoric extraterrestrial manifestations on Earth, and elsewhere in the Sol system.”
    “Oh, yes. Gruber realized he wasn’t going to be able to go on forever milking the stuff he had plagiarized from Von Däniken and Hoagland and others. So he financed some splashy expeditions and claimed anything they dug up, however ambiguous, as proof. All in keeping with the intellectual traditions of this school of thought, if you can call it that.”
    “No doubt. Nevertheless, as you have intimated, the Imperial Temple reflected at least an undercurrent of anti-Lokaron sentiment. This made it worth our while to investigate. The agent of whom I previously spoke made it his business to do so, and in the process made the acquaintance of Persath’Loven in the mid-2050s. It was also at this time that . . .” Svyatog hesitated. “This is not general knowledge, and I rely on your discretion. In 2055, a military vessel from Gev-Harath that was paying a courtesy call on this system spotted a formation of unidentified spacecraft—only briefly, for they almost immediately withdrew into the concealment of what seemed to be some very sophisticated cloaking technology. It was naturally assumed that they were experimental craft of yours, but our intelligence agencies were unable to discover any evidence of this.” A Lokaron smile. “Your mention of ‘unidentified flying objects’ in the last century naturally reminded me of this incident.”
    “It’s news to me, sir. And I have a very high security clearance.” But not necessarily a need to know, Andrew mentally hedged. But he was quite certain that the CNE possessed no cloaking technology capable of spoofing the Harathon space navy’s cutting-edge sensors as thoroughly as Svyatog implied.
    “The year after that, Persath published his last work about Earth. Most found it to be somewhat incoherent, verging on paranoia. Immediately after that, he returned home to Tizath-Asor, where he diverted his personal fortune into secretive researches into some odd byways of physics. Apparently he is still so occupied.
    “We might have looked more deeply into the matter. But the following year, in 2057, came the destabilization of the Kogurche system, and our intelligence resources—including the agent to whom I alluded earlier—were diverted to the developing crisis there. Two years before your war with Gev-Rogov broke out, that agent submitted his highly enigmatic report on the Black Wolf Society. We were puzzled, but his disappearance just after the war prevented us from pursuing the matter.”
    “You must have been even more puzzled when you learned he had been betraying you to Gev-Rogov,” Andrew ventured.
    “‘Betraying’ is too strong a word. He did remarkably good service for us during that period, and we have never found any evidence that he acted directly against our interests. Rather, he seems to have felt that working for the Rogovon was not incompatible with working for us. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that he considered both to be compatible with his own agenda.”
    And presumably he felt the same