He beamed: "Interrupt records." It was twenty Earth years of nothing happening, and the tiny CARM autopilot couldn't handle too many tasks at once. "Activate voice."

"Voice on." The .04 second delay was almost too short to notice.

"Send-" He displayed a picture of himself as a human being, with minor improvements. At age forty-two Kendy had been handsome, healthy, mature, firm of jaw, authoritative: a recruitment-poster version of a State checker.

These were not obedient State citizens. They hadn't trusted him twenty years ago. What words might give him a handle on Jeffer the "Scientist"?

He sent, "Kendy for the State. Jeffer the Scientist, your citizens have been idle too long."

Jeffer jumped like a thief caught in the act. Two long seconds passed before he found his voice. "Checker?"

"Speaking. How stands your tribe?"

Out beyond the terrible whorl of storm that surrounded Gold, out where water boiled and froze at the same time and the legendary stars were a visible truth, lived Kendy the Checker. He had claimed to be something like an elaborate cassette: the recording of a man. He had claimed authority over every human being in the Smoke Ring. He had offered knowledge and power, while they were still near enough to hear his ravings.

Perhaps he was only a madman trapped somehow aboard the spacecraft that had brought men from the stars. But he had knowledge. He had coached them through that terrible fall back into the Smoke Ring, fourteen years ago.

The face in the CARM's window had not been seen since. It was the face of a dwarf, a brutal throwback. The jaw and orbital ridges were more massive even than Mark's, the musculature more prominent.

"We lived through the reentry," Jeffer told him. "lisa and Merril are dead now. There are children."

"Jeffer, your tribe has possessed the CARM for fourteen of your years. In that time you have moved the tree twice and thenceforth done nothing at all. What have you learned of the people of the fourth Lagrange point?"

The what? "I don't understand the question."

"Sixty degrees ahead of Goldblatt's World on the arc of the Smoke Ring and sixty degrees behind are regions where matter grows dense. They are points of stability in Goldblatt's World's orbit. Material tends to collect there." The dwarf's brutal features registered impatience. "East of you by twelve hundred kilometers, a vast, sluggish, permanent storm."

"The Clump? You're saying there are people in the Clump?"

"I sense activity there. A civilization is growing twelve hundred kilometers from where your tree has floated for fifteen Earth years. Jeffer, where is your curiosity? Has it been bred out of you?"

"What do you want from me, Checker?"