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“Dubious,” Selar said. “You have managed quite well so far. However, for Lieutenant Sisko’s peace of mind as well as your own safety, it might be best if you did accompany me.”

“Did my father send you?” was the first thing Thamnos asked his two unexpected visitors. Then something seemed to tell him that was not the appropriate question, so he asked another. “How did you find me?”

“Is that of consequence, Dr. Cinchona?” Tuvok asked, suppressing any sign that he knew who Thamnos was; Sisko had suggested he do most of the talking when they first confronted their suspect. “I am Tuvok. This is Dr. Jacobs. We have read your paper on hilopon. We wish to learn more.”

First captain, now doctor! Sisko thought, trying to hold a deadpan in the face of his most recent promotion.

Thamnos’s beady little eyes lit up momentarily. “Are you from the Journal?” he asked hopefully. Suddenly the dread that had set in after his last conversation with Koval seemed lifted from his shoulders. If someone from the Federation side was willing to foster him, maybe he was safe after all.

Tuvok did not exactly answer the question. “There is another physician in our party who would be better able to address your research. May I summon her?”

Not many men can affect a swagger standing still. Thamnos somehow managed it. “Sure. Be happy to talk to her. Tell her to beam on in.”

Selar’s arrival alone might not have set him off. But something about Zetha’s presence made him suspicious.

“You’re a Romulan,” he said.

Before Zetha could answer, or even decide what to answer, Thamnos began to laugh.

“Okay, I get it! You’re not from the Journal. You’re not from the Federation side at all. I thought he’d come himself, but this is even better. He wants me to test it on you, to back up my article to the Journal. Of course, it all makes sense now…”

His voice and manner grew suddenly manic as he pushed past Sisko and went rummaging amid the debris in the corner until he had scattered all of it to reveal a case of datachips, which he set beside the jury-rigged computer, shoving the jars of hilopon aside.

“Oh, he’s clever! He doesn’t come himself, he sends one of the seeds…” Thamnos was muttering near-hysterically, fumbling through the chips in search of a particular one. “Let’s see, which seeding was it? This one? No. Perhaps this one… let’s see… yes, I think this is it.”

Silently Sisko gave Tuvok an inquiring look. Recommendation? the look said. Do we let him run amok or do we corral him now before he tries to destroy evidence? Tuvok shook his head imperceptibly: I recommend we ascertain what it is he is searching for first.

Thamnos inserted a datachip into the interface. “Computer, correlate retina scan of subjects present with extant files.”

The computer answered him with a code, and Thamnos turned to Zetha smugly. “I knew it! Sample 173. The photo on file makes it look like you have freckles, though. Or is that part of your cover?”

Perplexed, Zetha looked from Selar to Tuvok to Sisko, then back to Selar. “What is he talking about?” she demanded.

“I believe,” Selar said, “he has just provided us with the source of the disease vector.”

Cretak had read Koval’s character correctly. Knowing Tuvan’s Syndrome ran in his family, he had been obsessed with illness-and immunity to illness-all his life. When it first occurred to him what a marvelously versatile illness the Gnawing could be, he recalled what most people had forgotten-that some rare few Romulans were immune to the disease. Once his scientists were able to tell him why-possession of a particular rare gene sequence, extant in less than one tenth of one percent of the population-the rest seemed self-evident.

At first he thought he would simply gather together as many of those with the immunity sequence as possible, secretly infect them with the Gnawing, then scatter them like seeds throughout first the worlds on his side of the Zone, then on certain worlds on the Federation side where vulcanoids were common. He would choose as his “volunteers” Romulans who traveled frequently, many of them