Harper didn't answer him immediately. He'd resumed his seat and was studying the screen. "You're pretty well-established, aren't you? Married eighteen months ago—less than half a year after you arrived, congratulations—one child—"

"And another on the way," Zeiger interrupted.

Harper kept going. "You belong to Temple Ben Bezalel. Hipparchus Club, center bowler for the club's torqueball team, and you and your wife even belong to an amateur theater troupe."

"Yeah. So what? And I'm asking again—what's this all about?"

Harper leaned back in his seat and looked up at Van Hale. "What do you think, Judson?"

"Same as you." He hooked a thumb at Zeiger. "He checks out all across the board. What about Ronald Allen?"

Ferry scowled. "He smells worse and worse the more I study him. He seems to have made no serious attachments since he got here. And he has no regular address."

"Being fair, most roustabouts don't. And he hasn't been here that long."

"True. Still . . ."

Zeiger was obviously on the verge of exploding. Harper raised a calming hand and said, "What this is all about, Tim, is that somebody else was registered with your genetic marker number. Which, so far as anyone knows, doesn't ever happen. At least, I've never heard of Manpower duplicating numbers."

"There wouldn't be much point in it, anyway," Judson said, shaking his head. "If we assume for the moment that there's a covert operation involved. You'd run too much risk of the duplication being spotted, it would seem to me. Here on Torch, anyway. We've never kept quiet the fact that we require all ex-slaves to register when they arrive."

Zeiger had an odd look on his face. Whatever emotions were stirring in his head were enough to perk Genghis' interest. The treecat was looking at him intently.

"Uh . . . maybe not," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"The way I got freed was something of a fluke. A Havenite warship intercepted a slaver convoy—this was about thirty-five years ago—"

"Convoy?" Judson was a little startled.

Ferry nodded. "It's not unheard of. Usually slaver ships operate solo, but there are some exceptions. So what happened, Tim?"

"Well, the Havenites sprang the trap a little too early. Most of the convoy was able to translate into hyper before they could be run down. The ship I was on was the last one and the Havenites destroyed it, just a couple of minutes before the slave ship ahead of it made the transition."

Harper pursed his lips. "So . . . they'd have seen your ship blow up, is that what you're saying?"

"Yeah. And according to the Havenites who rescued me, it was pretty spectacular. They were astonished to discover any survivors. There was just me and a girl and the two slaver crewmen who grabbed her and dragged her into a lifeboat. I scrambled in just before they closed the hatch. They were mad enough to beat me a little, but not much, since they were mostly desperate to get free. I guess we left the ship just in time."

For an instant, his heavyset face got savage. "The Havenites pitched the two slavers into space less than an hour after they rounded us up. Without skinsuits. So me and the girl wound up being the only survivors."

The expression on his face lightened. "Her name was Barbara Patten. The one she took, I mean, after we were freed. Patten was the name of one of the Havenite crewmen. She wound up marrying him a year or so later, I heard. But I haven't had any contact with her in a long time now. Nice girl."

Harper and Judson looked at each other. "The proverbial hell's bells," muttered Ferry. "The slavers would have had records of their cargo, so they'd assume that Tim here just vanished. Perfect way to disguise an identity, without running the risk of faking a number entirely."

Zeiger was now frowning. "I don't get it. If this other guy has the same number on his tongue . . . The way you guys check those numbers, there's no way to fake them with cosmetics. They had to have been grown."

"You're absolutely right," Harper said grimly, rising from the desk. "Tim, don't leave the city till you hear from us again. Judson, I found Allen's current whereabouts. He's in a camp not more than a three hour flight from here. What say we sign out an air car and go talk to him?"

"After we pay a visit to the armory," said Van Hale. On his shoulder, Genghis growled approvingly.

God damn Jeremy. Hugh Arai's thought was simultaneously irritated and amused. Since the very beginning of this second audience he was having with Queen Berry, he hadn't been able to stop thinking of her as a woman instead of a monarch. Which, of course, was exactly the effect Jeremy had aimed for. The notorious terrorist was also a shrewd psychologist.

The effect was pronounced, too. Hugh was discovering that the more time he spent in the presence of Berry, the more attractive she became. In his earlier audience with the queen, he'd had a hard time to keep from laughing at the all-too-evident way the three Butre boys had been smitten by the young monarch. Especially so, after Ruth blurted it out openly. Now, he was getting worried his own tongue might be starting to hang out.

Figuratively speaking, of course. Hugh wasn't that far gone.

Still, the effect was striking. It had been a long time since Hugh had been this powerfully drawn to a woman.

That was her personality at work, he knew.

One thing being designed as marketable commodities did for genetic slaves was to make them automatically, one might almost say "painfully," aware of the difference between outside packaging and contents. Pleasure slaves, for example, were specifically genegineered to be physically attractive because physical beauty made them more valuable, brought a higher price. Heavy-labor units, like Hugh himself, on the other hand, were often downright grotesque, by the standards of most humans, because nobody gave a good goddamn what they looked like. After all, they were really just vaguely human-shaped pieces of disposable machinery, weren't they?

That left scars, whether the slaves wanted to admit it or not. Obviously, it was worse for some than for others, and the Beowulf medical community had worked with enough slaves over the centuries to be well aware of that fact. Hugh had undergone the standard psychological evaluations and therapy himself, although he'd actually gotten out light in that respect, compared to altogether too many liberated slaves. Still, the ultimate consequence was that, for better or worse, genetic slaves as a group were as well conditioned as any humans in history to ignore physical appearances and concentrate on the characters and personalities of the people they ran across.

The first impression most people would have of Berry Zilwicki was that she was a plain-looking girl. Attractive, overall, but only in the sense that any woman or man is attractive at that youthful age, assuming they are healthy and not significantly malformed in any way.

But Hugh had barely noticed her outward appearance at all. Instead, he'd focused from the outset on her personality. That was also somewhat superficial, of course, since personality and character overlapped but were hardly identical. Still . . .

If the human race held personality pageants the same way they did beauty pageants, Berry Zilwicki would surely be a finalist. Probably not a winner, because she just wasn't quite flashy enough. But a finalist, for sure—and given that Hugh wasn't partial to flashiness, that hardly made a difference.

God damn Jeremy.

Without realizing it, he must have muttered the words. Berry turned a friendly face toward him, smiling in that extraordinarily warm way she had. "What was that, Hugh? I didn't catch the words."

Hugh was tongue-tied. Odd, that, since he was normally a fluent liar when he needed to be. Something about those bright, clear, pale green eyes just made dissembling to her very difficult. It'd be like spitting in a mountain stream.