I don’t even know if Pelton’s still involved. The UN has probes in the system. Meanwhile the current plan calls for a base on the planet.”

I laughed. “Oh, sure!”

He grinned at me. “Set on a metal dish in stasis, inside a roller sphere also in stasis. It is antimatter, after all.”

He wasn’t making it up. He was too amused. “Civil servants love making plans. You can’t get caught in a mistake if you’re only making plans, and it can pay your salary for life. And I shouldn’t have heard that much, Beowulf, nor should you. If a terrorist knew where to find infinite masses of antimatter, things could get sticky.”

“And that is why you weren’t asked to ghostwrite the tour guide,” I surmised.

Ander smiled. He said, “Back to work. You’ve met Outsiders. Would you consider them a threat?”

“No.”

He waited. I said, “They’re fragile. Superfluid helium metabolism and no real skeleton, I think. Any place we consider interesting, they die. But never mind that, Ander—”

“They’ve got the technology to take accelerations that would reduce you or me to a film of neutrons.”

“Not the point. Can you tell me why they honor contracts? They’ve got ships to run away from any obligation. I think it must be built into their brains, Ander. They honor contracts, and they keep their promises. They’re trustworthy.”

He nodded, in no way dissatisfied. “Grogs? Are they dangerous?”

“Tanj straight they’re dangerous.”

He laughed. “Well, finally! Kzinti?”

“Sure.”

“Puppeteers. Where are they going?”

“Anywhere they want to.” He kept looking, so I said, “Clouds of Magellan? That’s not the interesting question. The Outsiders can boost a ship or a planet to near lightspeed. Can the puppeteers do that too? Or will they have to summon Outsiders to change their course?”

“And stop.”

“Yeah. I’d say they have the Outsider drive. They bought it or they built it.”

“Or they’ve got a research project that’ll get it for them.”

“I…futz.” Hire Outsiders to push five planets up to four-fifths of lightspeed, then try to figure out how to slow them down. Was that as risky as it sounded? I began to believe it wasn’t. There was nothing dangerous in the path of the puppeteer fleet. They had thousands of years to solve the puzzle.

Ander asked again: “Are the puppeteers a threat?”

He had generated in me a mulish urge to defend them. “They honor their contracts.”

“They’re manipulative bastards, Beowulf. You know that.”

“So are the ARMs. Your people have been in my face since I reached Earth. Do you know what Sharrol and I had to go through to have children?”

“The Fertility Board turned you down, of course.”

“Yah.”

“What did you do?”

“Sharrol used to play with a Carlos Wu. Carlos had an open birthright. So we worked something out. Then I went traveling.”