o a pickup behind the Speaker's chair
in the Executive Council Chamber ten stories below. The two thousand
seats had been almost all empty at 1000, when Council had convened.
Fifteen minutes later, the news had broken; now, at 1430, a good three
quarters of the seats were occupied. He could see, in the aisles, the
gold-plated robot pages gliding back and forth, receiving and
delivering messages. One had just slid up to the seat of Councilman
Hasthor Flan, and Hasthor was speaking urgently into the recorder
mouthpiece. Another message for him, he supposed; he'd gotten at least
a score such calls since the crisis had developed.

People were going to start wondering, he thought. This situation should
have been perfect for his purposes; as leader of the Opposition he could
easily make himself the next General Manager, if he exploited this
scandal properly. He listened for a while to the Centrist-Management
member who was speaking; he could rip that fellow's arguments to shreds
in a hundred words--but he didn't dare. The Management was taking
exactly the line Salgath Trod wanted the whole Council to take: treat
this affair as an isolated and extraordinary occurrence, find a couple
of convenient scapegoats, cobble up some explanation acceptable to the
public, and forget it. He wondered what had happened to the imbecile who
had transposed those Kholghoor Sector slaves onto an exploited time
line. Ought to be shanghaied to the Khiftan Sector and sold to the
priests of Fasif!

A buzzer sounded, and for an instant he thought it would be the
message he had seen Hasthor Fan recording. Then he realized that it
was the buzzer for the private door, which could only be operated by
someone with a special identity sign. He pressed a button and unlocked
the door.

The young man in the loose wrap-around tunic who entered was a
stranger. At least, his face and his voice were strange, but voices
could be mechanically altered, and a skilled cosmetician could render
any face unrecognizable. He looked like a student, or a minor
commercial executive, or an engineer, or something like that. Of
course, his tunic bulged slightly under the left armpit, but even the
most respectable tunics showed occasional weapon-bulges.

"Good afternoon, councilman," the newcomer said, sitting down across
the desk from Salgath Trod. "I was just talking to ... somebody we
both know."

Salgath Trod offered cigarettes, lighted his visitor's and then his
own.