I have a bad stomach and my breath gets a bit rank. When the day's shooting is over, I go to my cubicle and I can feel loneliness just as deeply as anyone."

He cleared his throat.

"So don't try to make me something I'm not, some object of awe and worship. I'm human, just like you."

"You're put together better than most women, you'll have to admit that."

"Ummm," she said, still holding onto his hand. "I'm glad for that, because it makes me a rich woman and it makes you like me."

"I do, very much."

"Like me?"

"More than that."

"Well, let's not move too fast. Let's take it one step at a time."

"I've never wanted to kiss anyone so badly in my life," he said.

"That's a small step," she said, leaning toward him.

She closed her eyes as his lips touched hers. She had kissed and been kissed many times, on the stage and in real time. She had never been promiscuous. She was not one of those who, in order to achieve her goal, bartered herself to the rich and powerful. From the first she had made it clear to the moguls and powers of the industry that she was not an object of trade, that she was Sheba, and that was enough to earn her her rightful place. She was not virgin, of course. She'd even been married once. That experiment had ended so badly that for many years she had avoided intimate relationships. However, she was a sensual person. She could take delight in good food, good music, a well done drama, and she could, with the right man, be a bawdy, delightful wanton. She wasn't sure—not just yet—whether she wanted to lower her guard enough to let Vinn Stem into her life, but with his lips on hers there was a moment when her libido stirred.

She let him enclose her in his arms. In the chill of the evening his warmth was stimulating. She widened her kiss, felt the hard muscles of his back under her palms, heard her sister Ruth say, "Sheba, Sheba."

"Ummm," she said, slightly annoyed but not questioning.

"Sheba, listen," said her brother David.

"Sheba, we need you," Ruth said.

"Huh?" She pulled away from Vinn's kiss.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said.

The voices were still there, heard dimly in her mind, the words indistinct but imparting a disturbing sense of urgency. She shook her head, gave herself once more to Vinn's kiss and the voices clamored in her head, driving away all hints of pleasure and desire.

"That's one step," she whispered, as she pushed Vinn away.

"I want to see you again," he said.

"Every day, lover," she said, rising.

"And at night?"

"One step at a time," she repeated.

She kissed him lingeringly on the steps to her living cubicle and for a moment it seemed that the voices were back. Inside she undressed quickly, cleaned her teeth, climbed gratefully into her bed. They came to her in her dreams.

"Sheba, Sheba."

"We need you, Sheba."

"Please, please, Sheba."

"Sheba, Sheba, Sheba."

CHAPTER SIX

Lieutenant Angela Bardeen pinned the twin suns first on one of Joshua Webster's shoulders and then the other. Finished, she stepped back and gave him a snappy salute. They were alone in Josh's office. The newly opened letter confirming his promotion lay on his desk.

"Very becoming, sir," Angela said.

Josh stepped forward, lifted her from her feet in an embrace, and kissed her.

"I would have expected more reserve in a senior officer," she teased.

"Tonight we celebrate," he said. "We'll have dinner at that place you like so well."

She pouted. "You always said it was too expensive."

"We'll blow my first month's pay increase."

She placed her palm on his forehead. "Well, you're not feverish."

He spanked her playfully on the rounded rump. The light slap was simultaneous with a thundering explosion that knocked the wall pictures askew and caused a suspended model of an X&A battle cruiser to sway on its hanging.

"What the devil?" Josh yelped.

Angela was on the communicator immediately. She listened for a few moments. "Some clown buzzed headquarters at supersonic speed."

"Well, they'll have his balls," Josh said. "They did identify him, of course."

Angela frowned. "I'm afraid not."

"You're kidding me."

"Sorry, no."

"Someone busts through the busiest air lanes in the galaxy at speed, rattles the windows of X&A headquarters, and he wasn't identified? What the hell, was he invisible?"

Admiral Julie Roberts and the X&A brass had substantially the same question. Captain Josh Webster was directed to find the answer.

"Captain," said the shift supervisor at Port Xanthos Control, "it was almost as if the sonofabitch was invisible."

"He couldn't have been going that fast," Josh said, "not and keep his hull intact."

"It wasn't that he was going all that fast," the supervisor said. "We had him on screen for a few seconds, long enough to measure his velocity. The speed isn't what bothers me. Any ship with a halfway decent flux drive could manage the speed. The question is, how did he drive into and out of the atmosphere at that rate without ablating his hull." He turned to a table, lifted a holoflat, handed it to Josh. "The automatic equipment snapped thirty or forty exposures. This is typical."

The glowing blur of a fireball was centered in the picture. "Computer enhancement?" Josh asked.

The supervisor handed him another holoflat. The central image was fuzzy and shapeless, nothing more than a concentration of light.

"What's your guess?" Josh asked.

"Sir, I don't know. It would be comforting if I could say it was a meteor.

But this thing seemed to materialize out of thin air. Tracking started less than fifty miles to the east at an altitude of a hundred and fifty thousand feet. The track arced down to pass headquarters at two thousand feet and then went vertical."

"Sit down, Captain," Admiral Julie Roberts said. Josh nodded, obeyed.

The admiral looked at him expectantly. "Well?" she asked.

"There seemed to be a tendency to brush off the incident as anunexplained anomaly," Josh said.

"That just won't do, Captain," Julie said sharply.

Josh spread his hands. "Something was there, obviously, something with mass to create a sonic boom and make an image on the detector screens. Any vessel with a fairly modern flux drive could match the speed, but at the expense of burning away so much insulation that it would break up."

"Josh, the whole place is buzzing," the admiral said. "You wouldn't believe some of the speculation that is going on."

"I can imagine," Josh said.

"We're sitting at the bottom of the most tightly controlled air and approach space in the U.P.," Julie said. "The volume of traffic dictates not just one extra-atmospheric layer of control but three. At peak times there's often a hold of hours on a ship wanting to land on Xanthos, and with three layers of approach control in near space a rock the size of your fist couldn't get through into atmosphere undetected."

"Something did," Josh said grimly.

Julie placed delicate fingers alongside her chin and stared moodily out of a window. The galaxy was big. Although man had been in space for thousands of years, it was still largely unexplored. And beyond the scattered rim stars at the edge of the Milky Way the bleak void of extragalactic space began. On the colossal scale of the universe man's little galaxy was an insignificance. Man himself? He was a frail creature, made of ephemeral stuff. He blustered himself outward from his small worlds, going armed and apprehensive, for although he was alone there was daunting evidence that others had gone before him. She had seen the Dead Worlds plying their eternal orbits in the hard, radiative glare of the core mass. She had read the Miaree manuscript, the chilling account of the death of two races; and she had come into contact with Erin Kenner's world. Intelligent species had come and gone in the home galaxy and one could only guess about the billions of possibilities offered in other areas of the cosmos. And to all races known to man had come death. Devastation.