Could a copy have been made?

"He returned," said Cucciolla. "He was absent a year or more and he came back and we met and he told us the bad news. Earth is a lie. It is nothing but a legend. The planet simply does not and has never existed."

"Yet you backed him to look for it." Dumarest was sharp. "You-all intelligent people-you believed the legend could be true."

"It was a game," said Ragin. "Something to amuse us. A childish fantasy."

"No!" Dumarest set aside the tisane and rose to pace the floor. Tiny plumes of dust rose from the carpet beneath his booted feet. "That's what you told yourselves after Rudi had returned to report his failure. An easy way of salving your pride. But before that, when you gave him your money, you had a belief in the enterprise. A conviction that he could succeed. Why?"

Cucciolla blinked. "Your meaning eludes me, my friend."

Was he deliberately obtuse? Dumarest said, patiently, "You must have had something to go on. Facts, data, items of information enhanced by considered logic. A rumor, even, which you considered to be worth investigating. For God's sake, man, think! Try to remember! Rudi went somewhere- that's why you raised the money. Where did he go? Why did he go there? What was it he went to check out?"

Talk, damn you! Die if you must, burst your heart, your brain, but talk before you go. Talk and tell me what Rudi had learned!

"Earl!" Ragin was standing before him, face close, eyes anxious. "Steady, man! Steady!"

"I'm all right."

"You sure? You looked like murder."

"It's nothing." Dumarest felt the perspiration on his face, the quiver of muscles, the raw tension in his stomach. He breathed deeply, inflating his lungs, fighting to be calm. "It's all right," he said. "I just want him to remember."

"He's an old man," said Ragin. "For him it isn't easy."

"You then? Can't you remember? You must have sat in on the discussions."

"Some, yes, but not all. I was almost a passenger and went along with the others." Ragin frowned, thinking, throwing his mind back into the past. "It began as a game, one of those what-would-happen-if things. What would happen if some of the old legends were true? Earth was mentioned, I forget why, and we took it from there."

"And?"

"That's about all?" Ragin met Dumarest's eyes. "All I remember," he added quickly. "It all happened years ago and things happened to blur the memory."

The desire to eliminate a mistake, of not wanting to appear a fool even to the inward self. A defense used by sensitive minds to maintain their delusions of superiority. Forget it and it ceased to exist. Think of it if you must but only as an amusing episode or a time of good fellowship, the meetings themselves the main reason for the existence of the group.

Ragin's reaction-Cucciolla?

"He had a book," he said. "Rudi had a book and it gave some hints and clues. Mostly rubbish, of course, but we applied the science of logical determination to the given statements and came up with some interesting speculations. As Carl said, it began as a game and progressed from there. Without Rudi to fire our imaginations it would have died within a week."

"The book?" A gesture told Dumarest it was useless to search. Rudi had taken it or it had been lost or destroyed. "The hints, then? The clues you mentioned?"

"I remember the first," said Ragin, glad to be of help. "Something connected to a religion of some kind. The creed of a cult which worked to remain secret. The Folk?" He frowned. "No, the People. The Original People. An item about a single home world. Ridiculous, of course, a moment's logical thought proves the inconsistency. How could so many divergent types have evolved on a single planet? How could there have been room to hold them all?" Those questions, for him, needed no answer. "But I think there was something else. A name. What was it now?"

"Erce," said Cucciolla. "It was Erce."

Erce-the name meant nothing. Dumarest looked from one to the other, at the books, the recordings. Had nothing been saved from those meetings?

"There was no need," said Cucciolla when he asked. "We met and talked and thrashed things out but nothing was important enough to keep. As Carl said we were swayed by Rudi and went along with him. A desperate move on the part of some, admitted, but what had they to lose? And we trusted him."

That was a mistake, but Dumarest didn't mention it. There was no need to destroy their happiness with the past. Rudi had succumbed to greed but he hadn't been the first and wouldn't be the last.

"Erce," he said. "Are you certain about that?" He watched them look at each other, nod. "Was there anything else? Think," he urged. "At one point in your discussion the need for Rudi to travel must have been mentioned. You simply wouldn't have given him money for no apparent reason. He wanted to book passage, right? To where? He returned, correct? From where? You'd backed him and he must have made a report. Those places would have been named, surely?"

These would be clues to work on failing all else, and Dumarest kept at it long past the time when good manners dictated he should leave. It was past dawn when he finally emerged from the building into the street and he stood with the cold wind stirring his hair as it stirred the flags high above. Early as it was the streets were busy-the three-shift system of the universities had destroyed the divisions of day and night in the city.

In a cafe he drank strong coffee while thinking, half-listening to the gossip which wafted around and over him like windblown leaves.

"Another suicide in Bolloten's class." A girl relayed the news while chewing at a bun. "That's the fourth this semester. One more and I hear they'll terminate his contract."

"Someone should cut his throat." A man scowled over a bowl of gruel. "He pushes too hard."

"But teaches fast. Three years' work done in two. If you can't take the heat you shouldn't stand near the furnace."

"Hear about Pell's tussle with the bursary?" A man spoke over a mouthful of bread. "They were going to dump him when he came up with that paper on sensitives."

"Convenient."

"It saved his skin. Any guesses where he got it?" A scatter of laughter greeted the question. "All right, but only a fool would sign up with him for easy credits. In a half-semester they'll be valueless."

"I can't see that," protested a woman. "What if he did get it from Okos? What difference does it make?"

"None, my innocent, but what the Cyclan lift up they can also let down. What good is Pell to them? Take my advice and stay away from his classes."

A man said wistfully, "Anyone care to stake me to a dorm bed for the winter? Treble back when I graduate or I'll be your willing slave in the spring. No takers? Well, no harm in trying."

So spoke the voice of poverty, and it would be worse outside where students huddled together in the chill of the night dreading the bleak time which would leave many of them frozen in the gutters.

Dumarest rose and left the cafe, making his way to the field where he stood in a secluded spot watching the ships, the men gathered at the perimeter, loungers with no apparent purpose and no obvious means of making a living. There would be touts among them and students and those with time to kill. Others could be there for a different reason and he tensed to a mounting sense of danger.

A cyber on Ascelius-why?

The Cyclan could have little interest in such a world; their concern with graduates would come only after they had gained positions of authority. The universities themselves would resent the services the Cyclan had to offer, priding themselves on their own intellectual ability. Even the Tripart had little influence beyond its immediate sphere and the Cyclan were noted enemies of wasted effort.

A coincidence, perhaps, but Dumarest knew it could be fatal to assume that. It was time for him to leave and yet he had gained nothing but a few names, times, places none of which held seeming importance. This was scant information on which to base a search but it was all he had and all he was likely to get from those involved. There had to be another way.