Kleema Netch was just hitting her droning stride. Darya tightened her jaw muscles and reminded herself that she had come here voluntarily. She had no one but herself to blame.

By late afternoon, Darya sat alone and exhausted in the central library of the Marglom Center. In the past seven hours she had met with twenty-three members of the research staff. Everyone had spoken in glowing terms of Quintus Bloom’s brilliance, his erudition, his quickness of mind; they accepted everything that he said, wrote, or thought.

So. He was Mister Wonderful. It was time to return to the Myosotis, and continue the journey to Labyrinth.

There was just one problem. Everyone that Darya had met at the center had also been so mediocre (Darya chose the most charitable word she could think of), it would not take much to impress them. Or, if it came to that, to snow them completely.

Faced with a maze of suspect opinion, Darya did what came to her as second nature. She went to her usual sources: the library banks. Words could lie, or mislead, as easily as people. But statistical records of background and achievement were hard to fake.

She called up Bloom’s biography, along with his list of publications. It was impressive. He had started research work at a young age, and had produced papers prolifically ever since. All his evaluations were in the file, and every one of them referred to him in the most glowing terms. He had advanced within the Marglom Center at the maximum possible pace.

Darya went back to the very beginning of the record. Jerome’s World employed an early education system in which human teachers formed an integral part of the teaching process. Quintus Bloom had been born in the small town of Fogline, lying halfway on a direct line between the Marglom Center and the spaceport. His parents had been killed in an industrial accident when he was five years old, and he had been raised by his grandparents. He had attended elementary school in that same town. The name of his teacher appeared in the record, but there were no detailed reports. All his grandparents were now dead.

If the town had been in any other direction, Darya would not have bothered. Her decision to stop at Fogline on the way back to the Myosotis was hardly more than pure impulse.

Amazingly, Bloom’s first teacher had not died, or retired, or disappeared. What he had done, as Darya learned late the next morning, was to leave Fogline and take a position in another small town, Rasmussen, about forty kilometers away.

There was no air service to Rasmussen. Now it was surely time to give up and press on to Labyrinth. Except that no aircraft flew to the spaceport from Fogline for another whole day. By mid-afternoon Darya, her impressions of Jerome’s World as a primitive place confirmed, found herself on a slow shuttle creeping toward Rasmussen. She did not feel optimistic. She would arrive long after school was over, and tracking down Orval Freemont might be difficult.

She peered out of the window. Labyrinth was below the horizon at this hour, but off to the east, according to the Marglom Center library, the artifact would appear as a seventh magnitude object in the evening sky. It would be just too faint to be seen with the naked eye. There was no way that Labyrinth could have remained undiscovered, if it had been there since Jerome’s World was first colonized. Darya sank back in her seat, deep in gloomy introspection. Apparently Quintus Bloom was right again: Labyrinth was a new Builder artifact. The first new artifact in three million years.

It was dusk when Darya emerged from the bus and stood gazing around her. Fogline had been electronics, Rasmussen was genetics. Both towns were at the minimum threshold size for automated factory production, so that although round-the-clock processing was performed, some elements of the work were still done by human effort. There were people on the streets, going to and from work.

When in doubt, ask. Rasmussen couldn’t have that many teachers.

“I’m looking for Orval Freemont. He works at the school.”

The third try produced results. A woman in a sable fur coat over a sheer silk lamé dress with golden thread — maybe not everyone on the street was an industrial worker — pointed to a building whose red roof was just visible along a side street.

“Better hurry,” she said. “Orval lives by himself, and he’s an early-to-bed type.”

The woman seemed sure of herself, but the man who opened the door to Darya’s knock made her wonder if she had the right house. Darya had imagined an elderly, stooped pedant. The cheerful, robust figure who stood in front of her didn’t look any older than Quintus himself.

“Orval Freemont?”

The man smiled. “That’s me.”

Darya went into her speech — a lie came easily, the twenty-fifth time around. Five minutes later she was sitting in the most comfortable chair of the little house, drinking tea and listening to Orval Freemont’s enthusiastic reminiscences of Quintus Bloom.

“My very first class, that was, when I was just a youngster in Fogline and none too sure of myself. Of course, your first class is always special, and you never forget the children in it.” Freemont grinned at Darya, making her wish he had been her first teacher. “But even allowing for that, Quintus Bloom was something special.”

“Special how?”

“I’ve probably taught other children as smart as Quintus, but never, then or since, have I had anyone who wanted so much to be Number One. He wouldn’t have heard of the word ambition, that first day in my class. But he already had it. Did you know, that very day he changed his own name? He came to class as John Jones, but he’d already decided that was too ordinary for what he intended to be. He wanted a special name. He announced that from now on he was Quintus Bloom, and he refused to answer to anything else. And he tried so hard, it was frightening. He’d do anything to be top, even if it meant cheating a little and hoping I wouldn’t notice.” Orval Freemont noticed Darya’s expression. “Don’t be shocked; all children tend to do that. Of course, part of the reason in his case was that he was a bit of an outcast. You know how cruel little kids can be. Quintus had this awful skin condition, big red sores on his face and on his arms and legs, and nothing seemed to clear them up.”

“He has them still.”

“That’s a shame. Nerves, I suspect, and I bet he still picks at them when he thinks nobody’s looking. Whatever the cause, it didn’t make his sores and scabs any less real. The other kids called him Scabby, behind my back. He didn’t say much, poor little lad, just put his head down and worked harder than ever. If you had come to me, even then, and asked me which of my pupils over the years was most likely to succeed, I’d have said Quintus Bloom. He needed it, the others didn’t.”

“Had he any other special talents that you noticed?”

“He sure did. He was the best, clearest writer for his age that I’ve ever met. Even when he got something wrong, I’d sometimes give him a little extra credit just for the way he said it.”

“I don’t suppose you kept anything that he wrote, back from his first years in school?”

Orval Freemont shook his head. “Wish I had. It didn’t occur to me that Quintus would become so famous, or maybe I would have. But you know how it is; the little kids grow older, and the next class of young ones comes in, and your mind is suddenly all on them. That’s what keeps you young. I remember Quintus, and I always will, but I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about him.”

Darya glanced at her watch and stood up. “I have to get back to Fogline, or I’ll be away another whole day. I really appreciate your time. You know, I’ve dealt a lot with teachers, and I’ve learned to appreciate the good ones. If you wanted to, you could be teaching in a university instead of an elementary school.”