Stavros raised an eyebrow. Now he was surprised; Fogelman had never bothered with excuses before. He looked at the data card on his desk; it had no label. It could have been anything from a laundry list to the score for a symphony. He'd have to plug it into his computer to know for sure. No time for that now?he got sucked into argument and frantic note scrawling on just what the proper definition for "civilization" was.

The ringing bell took him by surprise. "See you all a week from now," Fogelman said. "I'm looking forward to the reports." A lot of profs would have been blowing smoke with that line, but he sounded as if he meant it. He grinned. "One of you has a real plum."

He was a good psychologist; Stavros was sure he wasn't the only student who hurried off to the dorm to see what world he'd drawn.

He brought the report up on the screen. The lead frame had a list of authors and a vid shot of the principal author. She was a redhead good-looking enough to make Stavros pause a moment before he started paying attention to the document itself. When he did, his jaw dropped. He whistled softly. "He wasn't kidding," breathed the young man from New Thessaly. "Bilbeis IV?"

Pleased with herself, Paulina Koch attacked the printouts in her IN basket with an energy alien to the dogged persistence that was her hallmark. She saw with relief that no red-flagged items were in there, and only a few with yellow warning tags. The Survey Service was orderly and efficient, as it should have been.

She disposed of the first two priority items in short order. One should never have had a flag; a deputy coordinator earned a black mark for not being able to make up his own mind.

The third paper with the yellow strip at the top made her frown. Why should she care in particular if the Survey Service ship J?ng Ho had come in to the Service base on Topanga from a routine survey of a world without space travel? Then she saw which world it was and punched for the full report.

The Survey Service had given itself a black eye on Bilbeis IV, no doubt about it. The Purists had been beating the Service over the head with David Ware's folly for fifteen hundred years. Fortunately, most interference canceled out in time, no matter how loud the Purists yapped. The odds were excellent that Bilbeis IV would be another case like that and could return to the obscurity it deserved.

The abstract came up on the screen. Paulina Koch read it. Disciplined as always, she started on the report itself. The phone buzzed several times while she was working through it. She was a trained speed-reader; the long document took her only about an hour and a half.

That was how long her career took to crumple, she thought when she was done. If Valleix howled for blood at the thought of giving a race a plow it had not had before, what would he say about giving a world a goddess? She knew the answer to that only too well: he would howl to shut down the Service. He'd have backing too, curse him, not just Purists but penny-pinchers of all stripes. She'd fought for years to keep that kind of unholy alliance from forming. Now it had a cause to coalesce around, one she knew would be strong enough to wreck the Service and her with it.

Even so, she thought she was in perfect command of herself until she tried to clear the report. She needed three stabs before she could hit the right button. At last the screen went blank and gray.

She also had to try several times before she got the extension she wanted.

"External Affairs," a deep voice said.

"Hovannis, will you come up here for a moment?" At least her voice gave away nothing, she told herself with lonely pride. Not that it mattered?not that anything would matter once the report came out. Still, rather than just yield to despair, she preferred to go on naturally as long as she could. "An interesting situation has arisen, one you'll want to see."

"On my way," Hovannis said briskly. The phone went dead. Hovannis was a capable man, Paulina Koch thought, well suited to running the Survey Service's External Affairs Bureau?Security, an organization less sensitive to public relations would have called it.

Stavros Monemvasios felt caffeine buzzing through his veins like current through wires. Excitement also energized him, perhaps more powerfully. Under both stimulants his exhaustion was rising, but he had no trouble shoving it down, though his clock told him the time was closer to sunrise than to midnight. He would be a zombie in class, but he did not care.

Fogelman couldn't have looked at the data cards before he dished them out. Stavros was certain of that. The report on Bilbeis IV was no plum; it was a bomb, waiting to go off and blow the Survey Service to smithereens.

Even as an undergrad, Stavros had learned about Bilbeis IV. It was the "don't" pounded into every would-be fieldworker, and carried two lessons with it. Breaking the rule of noninterference not only improperly influenced primitive worlds, it also guaranteed?and earned?professional death for anyone foolish enough to try it.

Improperly influenced… "Ho, ho, ho!" Stavros muttered. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a humorless grin. He would have backed that phrase in any understatement contest anywhere.

That anthropologist had cured Queen?what was her name? Sabium, that was it?Queen Sabium's cancer, all right. He'd cured her so well that there she still was, very much alive, fifteen hundred years later. No wonder a whole continent and part of another worshiped her as the undying goddess.

Stavros wished it weren't so late. He wanted to call Fogelman and scream in his ear. He reached for his phone. The anthropology prof had given his grad students his home code, and he wouldn't mind getting out of bed for news like this.

Then Stavros put the phone down. Rousting Fogelman would be fun, but coming into class in a week, all cool and innocent, and stunning everyone at once sounded even better. He plucked at his beard, trying to compose a couple of innocent-sounding opening sentences for his presentation. He chuckled. That wouldn't be easy.

He wondered just how many heads would roll at the Survey Service because of the Bilbeis IV report. He was no Purist, but he didn't relish the idea of having a whole planet's development yanked out of shape by external influences. And the only way the Service kept its budget so nice and fat was by insisting that kind of thing never happened, never could happen. Now that it had, a lot of people would need to cover their asses in a hurry.

He caught himself yawning enormously. Caffeine or no, work on the presentation would have to wait till tomorrow.

Roupen Hovannis did not read as fast as his boss, but he did not have to wade through the whole report, either. Paulina Koch brought the relevant, damning sections up on the screen one at a time.

"Enough," Hovannis said, waving for her to stop. He was a big, dark stocky man with a large hooked nose, heavy eyebrows, and a permanent five o'clock shadow even though he shaved twice a day. The thuggish exterior added to his effectiveness; people underestimated his intelligence.

"Reactions?" Paulina Koch asked after Hovannis had sat silent for some time.

"We are in major trouble if and when this report gets out." Paulina Koch frowned; she preferred bureaucratic circumlocutions to plain speech. But at the moment Hovannis did not care; for one of the few times in his career, he was shaken. He went on. "PK"?no one called the Chairman by her first name, not more than once?"when the Purists see it, they'll scream for our blood, and I think they'll get it. The document is plenty to drive everyone cool or lukewarm to us into the Purist camp, and to make our friends look for a good place to hide."