"Don't smart-ass me, Manny. Who's not allowing what?"

Manny took a long pull from the old-fashioned glass he was holding before replying. "Orders from the very top," he said.

"McGrath himself?"

"That's right. He wants us to cooperate in every way we can with the U.N."

"You mean he won't run the stuff I sent? Eyewitness report of the Peacekeeper's death?"

Manny shrugged. "I'm trying to get it past the suits upstairs, Edith. Honest I am."

"Honestly," she muttered.

"Honestly," he said, three seconds later.

"This is a weird situation," Edith said.

"Tell me about it."

For more than twenty-four tense hours, Joanna feared that the Peacekeepers were going to keep her and Lev in Corsica. When their Clippership landed at the Peacekeeper base, the two of them were shuffled through several layers of bureaucracy, including the most thorough medical examinations they had undergone in years.

"You will need a few days to adjust to terrestrial gravity," the chief doctor told her and her husband, from behind his metal desk.

In truth, Joanna did feel the sullen weight of Earth more than she had expected. She had spent more time on the Moon than on Earth for a quarter-century now, but she always exercised every day while in Moonbase and never considered her returns to Earth as health-threatening.

"I'll be fully adjusted in another few hours," Joanna said. She glanced at Lev, who seemed blithely unaffected by the six-fold increase in gravity.

The doctor shook his head good-naturedly. "No, I am afraid it will take several days, at least."

He was a smiling, plump, golden-skinned Chinese with many chins and rolls of fat showing at the open-necked collar of his short-sleeved Peacekeeper tunic. Joanna thought he might have been the model for statues of the happy Buddha that she had seen in gift shops. He spoke with a cultivated British accent, which sounded very strange coming from his round, almond-eyed Chinese face.

Joanna smiled back at him, coldly. "Doctor, have you found anything in the examinations your people have given us to indicate a health problem?"

"No," he said, drawing the word out. "But still the effects of increased gravity must be taken into account."

Sweetening her smile, Joanna asked, "You're waiting for the results of our blood tests, aren't you? You're stalling for time until you learn whether or not there are nanomachines in our blood streams."

The doctor's fat-enfolded eyes widened for just a heartbeat. Then he folded his hands across his ample belly and admitted, "Just so. We must be extremely careful about allowing nanomachines into the terrestrial environment."

Satisfied, Joanna replied, "We're not harboring nanomachines."

"We are not Trojan horses," Brudnoy chipped in.

"But you have both undergone nanotherapy on the Moon, haven't you?" the doctor asked.

"No," Brudnoy replied simply. "I've never had to, although I admit as I get older the temptation grows stronger."

"It does?"