The monograph got short shrift; Magda lacked the heart to work on it. She also kept delaying taking the report on Bilbeis IV back to the field office. Finally she made herself do it. She had no better monument to offer the crew of the J?ng Ho.

Riding the shuttle felt strange?she had grown too used to being cooped up. Pandit the clerk raised an eyebrow when she walked into the office. "You were so intent on transmitting this, and then you never came back. May I ask what happened?"

"I died," she said. "Ask your computer if you don't believe me."

His eyes widened as he made the connection. "The Clark County?"

"Exactly. I was supposed to be on it." Briefly, not naming names, she explained how she had stayed behind, and finished, "So if I had been on that ship, odds are this would have stayed shelved for good. Make sure Central gets it this time, will you, Pandit?"

"I don't know what went wrong the first two times." He sounded genuinely aggrieved; like Peters, he did not care for anything that upset his routine. Unlike the case of the credit representative, though, getting that routine back implied helping Magda, not frustrating her. He loaded the data card into his terminal and squirted its information across the light-years.

"Come in, Roupen. Do please sit down." Paulina Koch flicked an imaginary speck of lint from her gray blouse. Her slacks were a darker shade of gray, almost charcoal; that was as much extravagance as she allowed herself as far as clothes went. Anyone who thought of the Survey Service Chairman in a negligee?in itself an unlikely notion?would have imagined her in a gray one.

"What's up, PK?" Hovannis rumbled. Paulina Koch handed him a printout. His always dour features grew harsher still as he scanned it. "We've already scrubbed this twice," he observed. "If we do it again, whoever keeps filing the damned thing will really start wondering what's going on."

"It's already gone," the Chairman said, "though I leave to you the details of making the erasure invisible. We've involved ourselves too deeply in denying the authenticity of the report to have it linger in public files even for a moment."

"That's true," Hovannis agreed. They both knew what an understatement it was.

Paulina Koch hesitated before going on, as if searching for words. At last she said, "After the tragic loss of the Clark County, I had not expected to see this document surface again."

"Neither had I," Hovannis answered. They said no more than that; the subject was much too touchy to go into deeply.

"We have to be more thorough," the Chairman said.

"I'll look into it," Hovannis said.

Paulina Koch was checking another printout. She nodded to herself. "As I thought: the entire complement of the J?ng Ho is listed as having been aboard the Clark County."

"I'll look into it," Hovannis repeated.

"Very well. Thank you for coming up." The Chairman's eyes had returned to her screen before Hovannis was out of her office.

VII

"Thank you." Andrea switched off the phone and savagely flung it against the back of one of Stavros's chairs. "Oh, that bastard!"

"Another one?" Stavros sighed. Both of them had grown very familiar with a stock set of responses over the last few days.

"She might as well have been a recording," Andrea said glumly. " 'I am sorry. You may even be right, but people are bored with Bilbeis IV, and what you have is not exciting enough to make them sit up and take notice again.' At least she didn't tell me it wasn't sexy enough to get on the news, the way some of them have."

"Trouble is, they're right. How do you make people care about eighteen days? You can't show them a picture of eighteen missing days the way you can of eighteen missing starships."

"But when they show the Survey Service is lying?"

"The way it looks, not everyone cares about that," Stavros said. "Do you know what one of the people I talked to told me? Something to the effect that of course government agencies lie, and the job of the news team was to catch them lying at something interesting. Without the J?ng Ho's crew, we just can't do that."

Andrea set her hands on her hips. "You'd think the crash of the Clark County would wake them up."

"I know, I know." Stavros banged his fist against his thigh in frustration. "Trouble is, we shouted murder at the Survey Service over Professor Fogelman and weren't able to make it stick. Now it doesn't matter how loud we yell it, because no one's willing to pay attention anymore."

"Does that mean you want to give up?" Andrea asked.

"No, of course not." Stavros hoped he sounded indignant. He very much wanted the Service brought to account for all it had done. He was no longer confident that would happen, but he wanted it all the same. And even more, he wanted not to lose Andrea. If he quarreled with her over this, he was sure he would. So, suppressing his misgivings, he went on. "We'll keep trying."

"All right, then. Who's next on our list?"

He recalled it on the computer. "The Unvarnished Truth."

"I've seen their output once or twice." Andrea looked unhappy. "Have we really sunk so low?" She retrieved the phone from where it leaned drunkenly against a wall and punched buttons. "Hello, this is Andrea Dubois. Could you please put me through to your managing editor? Yes, I'll wait… Hello? This is Andrea Dubois. I have important new information on the Bilbeis IV scandal?"

The discreet individual wanted to take those two idealistic idiots off to one side and pound some sense into them. Newsmen were notorious fools, but Van Shui Pong got the message once it was shouted loud enough. He might not have been able to put together two and two, but he could add one and three hundred-odd. Hyperion Newsnet was very quiet these days.

Sometimes the discreet individual thought about picking up some extra money blackmailing the Survey Service?after so long on the job, he could not escape realizing who was paying him. The Service would give him what he wanted, he thought; he had already shown he could keep his mouth shut.

But he kept on taking his fees and not pushing for more. The Clark County told him a story, too: he decided he did not want the Survey Service reminded of how much he knew. Sometimes being discreet and seeming slightly stupid looked a lot alike.

He wished the graduate students could understand that, and understand he was just the cutting edge of what they were up against. It wasn't going to happen, though. All their training went against it. They had to seem smart in class, so they thought they had to be smart all the time.

That, he knew, wasn't so smart itself.

One evening a week, Stavros had a class Andrea did not. Though his Basic was more than fluent and he also wrote it well, he kept working to improve. Being with Andrea so much showed him how much better he could do, and so he endured the composition course for the sake of the tricks it taught him. Andrea felt the class was helping his writing.

That night the instructor had been talking about adverbs and how to use them: in small doses, Stavros gathered. The instructor claimed the real skill lay in picking the right verb in the first place rather than in adjusting the meaning of one not so right with modifiers. Remembering some of his own papers, he decided the notion sounded reasonable. He wondered what Andrea would think of it.

"I'm back," he called as he opened the door to his rooms.

No one answered. His dark brows drew together. He and Andrea did not spend all their nights together, but she'd been there when he left, and he hadn't known she was going anywhere. He stepped toward the computer, wondering if she'd left a message.