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"Hardly a privilege. Only my duty." He stared into Riva's eyes as her pupils dilated and she sank back limply in her chair. He didn't bother with the standard opening litany of neutral questions while waiting for the drug to cut in, but merely watched her lips. Their thin tension slowly softened to the stereotypical fast-penta smile. Her eyes remained more focused than those of the usual subject; he bet she could make this a lengthy and circuitous interrogation, if she chose. He'd do his best to cut that circuit as short as possible. The shortest way across a hostile District was around three sides.

"This was a really interesting five-space problem that Professor Vorthys set you," Miles observed to her. "Sort of a privilege to be brought in on it."

"Oh, yes," she agreed cordially. She smiled, frowned, her hands twitched, then her smile settled in more securely.

"Could be prizes and academic preferment, when it's all sorted out at last."

"Oh, better than that," she assured him. "New physics only come along once in a lifetime, and usually you're too young or too old."

"Strange, I've heard military careerists make the same complaint. But won't Soudha get the credit?"

"I doubt it was Soudha who thought of it. I'd bet it was the mathematician, Cappell, or maybe poor Dr. Radovas. It should be named after Radovas. He died for it, I suspect."

"I don't want anybody else to die for it."

"Oh, no," she agreed earnestly.

"What did you say it was, again, Professor Riva?" Miles did his best to pitch his voice like a bewildered undergraduate's. "I didn't understand."

"The wormhole collapsing technique. There ought to be a better name for it. I wonder if your Dr. Soudha calls it something shorter."

Lord Auditor Vorthys, who'd been watching with slit-eyed disapproval, sat slowly upright, his eyes widening, his lips moving.

The last time Miles had felt his stomach behave like this, he'd been on a combat drop from low orbit. Wormhole collapsing technique? Does this mean what I think it does?

"Wormhole collapsing technique," he repeated blandly, in his best fast-penta interrogator style. "Wormholes collapse, but I didn't think anything people could do could cause them to. Wouldn't it take an awful lot of power?"

"They seem to have found a way around that. Resonance, five-space resonance. Amplitude augmentation, you see. Shut it down forever. Don't think it would work in reverse, though. Can't be anti-entropic."

Miles glanced at Vorthys. The words obviously meant something to him. Good.

Dr. Riva waved her hands dreamily in front of her. "Higher and higher and higher and—boop!" She giggled. It was a very fast-penta'ish sort of giggle, the disturbing sort which suggested that on some other level, in her drug-scrambled brain, she was not giggling at all. Maybe she was screaming. As Miles was . . . . "Except," she added, "that there's something very wrong somewhere."

No lie. He walked over and picked up they hypospray of antagonist, and glanced up at Vorthys. "Anything you want to add while she'd still under? Or is it time to go back to normal mode?"

Vorthys still had an abstracted, inward look, his mind obviously ratcheting over everything he'd learned during the investigation in light of this new, revolutionary idea. He glanced up and over at the goofily grinning Riva. "I think we need all our wits about us." His brows drew down in something like pain. "One sees, of course, why she hesitated to confide her theory to us. In case it is right . . ."

Miles walked over to Riva with the second hypospray. "This is the fast-penta antagonist. It will neutralize the drug in your system in less than a minute."

To his astonishment, she threw up a restraining hand. "Wait. I had it. I could almost see it, in my mind . . . like a vid projection . . . energy transfers, flowing . . . field reservoir . . . wait."

She closed her eyes and leaned her head back; her feet tapped gently and rhythmically on the floor. Her smile came and