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At any rate, the game was not yet played out; and, Spangler reminded himself wryly, he was not charged with the responsibility of revising the Empire's military policy. He had one simple task to perform:

Find the Rithian.

Which brought him inevitably back to Pembun. Spangler's irritation returned, and grew. With a muttered, "Damn the man!" he stood and began pacing restlessly up and down his office.

Spangler was a career executive, not a Security operative; but he knew himself to be conscientious, thorough, interested in his work—and he had been in the Department for fifteen years. He ought not to feel about anyone as he felt about Pembun: baffled, uneasy, his mind filled with shadowy suspicions that had no source and no direction.

For the third time that evening, he sat down and leafed through Pembun's dossier. Keith-Ingram was right, the man's early record was absolutely clean. He had been trusted by the Empire, as much as a colonial could be, for thirty years. But DeptSecur never ceased gathering information on anyone. Since the moment of Pembun's arrival on Earth, tiny robot monitoring devices had been following him wherever he went. At a slight distance, they could be mistaken for small flying insects. Their subminiaturized circuits recorded every word he spoke, or that was spoken in his presence.

On his first day, after the conference in Spangler's office, Pembun had stayed in his rooms, had made no calls, and had seen no one but Spangler himself. On the following day, he had left early and had spent the morning sightseeing. In the afternoon, after lunch in the Hill, he had gone shopping and had bought several small articles—listed in the report—in specialty shops on the Grand Mall and on Prospect Avenue. The proprietor of one of the shops was an ex-Outworlder, a man named Pero Mineth. A précis of his dossier was appended. No suspicion was attached to Mineth, other than the fact of his origin. The two men had spoken in Standard English, and briefly.

On the third day, Pembun had made two calls, one to a member of the visiting trade mission from Gloryfield, the other to an ex-cabinet minister of Manhaven, now resident in the city; later, he had met them for lunch. Their conversation had been recorded in full. It contained occasional remarks in Standard, but the rest was in Outworld dialects.

Spangler stirred restlessly in his chair as he reread the transcript. The machine translations were not satisfactory.

Pembun: Oo taw preé don stomà pi vantan, combé? [Where (from) have you taken (on) that stomach since twenty years, comrade?]

Coopo: De manj, ké penz—no t'ay stomà ti! [From eating, what (do you) think—you have not (a) small stomach!]

Pembun: Dakko! So pelloké gri! [Agreed! I am (a) gray parrot!]

"Gray parrot," no doubt, had some idiomatic significance which had come into use, in the Outworlders' abominably volatile language, since the last time the machines' vocabulary banks had been revised. It was impossible to keep up with them; new expressions came into being and others fell into disuse every day. Recent Manhaven publications, films, tri-D cubes and monitored interstellar messages were being checked; when the doubtful passages were satisfactorily interpreted, the new meanings would be read into the machines for future use; but in a week, or a month, or a year, they would be valueless again.

What a striking example of Empire superiority over the bumbling, loosely organized Outworlds! In Standard, you knew where you were. There was a general vocabulary of ninety thousand words, plus technical and special vocabularies of as many as fifteen thousand words each, and every word always meant the same thing. New words, and adaptations of old ones, had to be approved by three levels of the Advisory Commission on Standard English; and they moved with admirable deliberation. The result was a perfectly precise and yet perfectly flexible language which could be understood without error by any Standard speaker.

By contrast, language seemed to be some kind of game to the Outworlders. They delighted in changing it, distorting their already slovenly speech—competing with each other in the use of neologisms, new turns of phrase. How could they ever be certain they had really understood one another? Didn't they care?

… At any rate, Spangler's intuition told him that the conversation at lunch would probably turn out to be innocent. That was not what was bothering him; there was something else.

He stood up, began pacing again. Given: Pembun was clean. He was really what he seemed to be, a clumsy but devoted servant of the Empire. But—Spangler stopped. There was one thing which the dossier did not explain, and it was the first thing an agent of Security should want to know.

"What does he want?" Spangler asked aloud.

That was it—it located the sore spot that had been bothering Spangler for four days. What was Pembun after? What did he hope to accomplish? His talk was subtly flavored with amused contempt for the Empire and admiration for the Rithians. Then why was he working for one to defeat the other?

That was the thing to find out.

The December sky was a luminous gray above the transparent roof of the city. It had snowed earlier in the day, but the white flakes had melted as soon as they fell on the heated double panes; the water had run off into gutters and downspouts, and so into the city's water system. Within the city, the temperature remained at its year-round 72°. In less than two weeks, the year would be over: it would be January 1, 2522; but the city crowds would know it only by their fax sheets and calendars.

A little man in badly-fitting clothes solemnly stood in line at the exit from the north-south express tube, was fluoroscoped in his turn, tipped his absurd cap to the uniformed technician, and wandered down the ramp to the Imperial Plaza. An insect, so tiny and grayish that it was almost invisible, floated a meter behind him and above his head. Light glinted from the miniscule lenses of its eyes.

This was an older section of the city, built nearly two hundred years ago to celebrate the annexation of Colombo, Retreat, Godwin's World and Elysium. In spite of the sanctions against transfer of property in declining areas, many substantial businesses had moved out and rows of tawdry shops had sprung up in their place.

Pembun wandered along the row of open-fronted shops, inspecting the heaped souvenirs and gimcracks with childish interest. The tiny insect followed him. He picked up a cadmium-powered kaleidoscope, stared through it, and put it down again. At the next stall, he bought ten jointed dolls, crude things from LoaLoa, and asked the attendant to gift package them. He gave an address for their delivery; the listening insect noted it.

Pembun wandered on. In a fruit stall, where he had just bought a bunch of cultured grapes from a dispenser, he came face to face with a tall, leathery man in a yellow tunic. The two men greeted each other with cries of pleasure.

"Hernà! Cabró!"

"Pembun kukarà! No es in carsé?

"Si, in terrà. Como sa ba?"

The two men talked on, oblivious to the contemptuous stares of passersby. The hovering insect transmitted every word they spoke.

At last the leathery man turned to go. "A bentó, Pembun. Ser a festo?"

"Tendi—so pelloké gri!"

The two men grinned at each other, waved, and left the fruit stall in different directions. Another insect, high in the air, slanted down and began to follow the leathery man as he walked across the Plaza. Followed by the original insect, Pembun strolled back to the tube entrance and headed for the Hill.