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The tap water shut itself off. He dried himself vigorously with the only towel he’d be permitted on the voyage, picked up the soiled shipsuit from where he’d dropped it, and crossed the cabin to the tiny partitioned alcove where his travel bag hung unfolded. Depositing the old clothes on the closet floor, he got out another set, dressed himself carefully and comfortably, then made another withdrawal from his bag, went to the unfolded bunk with a small electronic device clutched almost desperately in his knobbly fingers.

He lay down, placed the mechanism beside him, drew a small cable from it, and fastened the eye-mask on its free end over his face. His hand hovered over a large green button on the side of the black plastic case.

Then he paused in thought once more.

The Renatasia had been a lovely system.

He recalled it vividly: eight plump planets and a cheerful medium-size yellow star set a surprising number of parsecs outside the then-current margins of the million-system Empire. Apparently they’d been human-colonized in some dim spacefaring prehistory, although no records of the event survived, either there or in “civilized” reaches. For the Administration a million systems, of course, were not enough. A billion wouldn’t be. Thus Renatasia must be brought under its kindly influence.

Renatasia III and IV were the jewels in their cozy and conveniently isolated diadem. From space they appeared warm, lush, green and inhabited by a people who used steel, titanium, and simple organoplastics, were capable of wringing useful amounts of energy from the core of the atom, and who had not only reached but profitably colonized every one of the remaining six bodies in their system, from freeze-dried outermost, to charcoal flambéed innermost—albeit under domes and in burrows, rather than through the total climatic transformation that even the Empire often found too expensive to pursue.

They had not quite reinvented faster-than-light spacedrives, although they were fiddling with its theoretical underpinnings. Nor had they yet made the basic discoveries that would inevitably lead them to such mechanisms as deflector shields, tractor-pressor beams, disruptors, and disintegrators—a fact for which the Centrality navy was later to be rather embarrassedly grateful. For they could also fight, it developed, like the very devil. They’d been doing it for millennia.

Mathilde was the capital city of a nation-state of the same name, located on the second largest continent of Renatasia III. Reception of the system’s crude, flat, electronic sound-and-picture transmissions revealed that her citizens spoke a much-corrupted version of the commonest language of the galaxy—this was to serve as justification for the intervention that came later—and were the most prosperous and technologically advanced people in the system, their offworld colonies the most numerous and successful.

The nation-state of Mathilde, along with others like it, was located in the north temperate zone, and divided its activities about equally between agriculture and manufacturing. Just like every other polity in the system, it had forgotten its long-past origins elsewhere in the galaxy. Mathildean writers and scholars speculated about what future explorers would discover among the stars, and whether there was intelligent life in outer space.

A severely damaged civilian star-freighter had first happened upon the Renatasia System by accident. Once it had limped back to port for repairs, her captain had dutifully reported the system’s existence to the government. No contact had been made by the freighter, which made things very much easier for the intelligence operative assigned the task of establishing official communications. The Ottdefa Osuno Whett.

His academic credentials had always been the perfect cover for a Centrality spy. Where can an anthropologist not go and poke his long, thin nose into the most intimate and personal details of a culture?

Before leaving, his superiors had equipped him, more or less