"I'm not a sports fan," I said, not wishing to be too polite, "but it seemed to me your technique was different from the others I saw tonight."

He took a long drag on his cheroot, then examined the glowing tip as he slowly exhaled purple smoke. He transferred his gaze to me, and some of the heat seemed to go with it. There was a deepness to his eyes I hadn't noticed at first. You see that sometimes, in the very old. These days, of course, it is usually the only way you can tell someone is old. MacDonald certainly had no other signs of age. His body looked to be in its mid-twenties, but he'd had little choice in its features, given his profession. Slash boxers inhabit fairly standardized bodies, in nine different formulas or weight classes, as a way of minimizing any advantage gained by sheer body mass. His face seemed a bit older, but that could have been just the eyes. It wasn't old enough for age to have impressed a great deal of character on it. Neither was it one of those generic "attractive" faces about half the population seem to prefer. I got the feeling this was pretty much the way he might have looked in his youth, which-I remembered, with a little shock-had been spent on Earth.

The Earth-born are not precisely rare. The CC told me there were around ten thousand of them still alive. But they look like anyone else, usually, and tend not to announce themselves. There were some who made a big thing about their age-the perennial talk-show guests, story-tellers, professional nostalgics-but by and large the Earth-born were a closeted minority. I had never wondered why before.

"Walter said you'd talk me into joining this project of his," MacDonald said, finally, ignoring my own comment. "I told him he was wrong. Not that I intend to be stubborn about it; if you can give me a good reason why I should spend a year with you two, I'd like to hear it."

"If you know Walter," I countered, "you'll know he's possibly the least perceptive man in Luna, where other people are concerned. He thinks I'm enthusiastic about this project. He's wrong. As far as I know, Walter is the only one interested in this project. It's just a job to me."

"I'm interested," Brenda piped up. MacDonald shifted his gaze to her, but didn't feel the need to leave it there long. I had the feeling he had learned all he needed to know about her in that brief look.

"My style," he said, "is a combination of ancient fighting techniques that never got transplanted to Luna. Some well-meaning but foolish people passed a law a long time ago banning the teaching of these oriental disciplines. That was back when the conventional wisdom was we ought to live together in peace, not ever fight each other again, certainly not ever kill each other. Which is a nice idea, I guess.