The grass vanished. He waited, hollow.

Three men walked slowly through Sugar Lump City. Paul trailed Taft and Green, their urgent talk washing past his awareness. The sights, sounds and smells of the new City poured into his empty memory.

The embryonic street was lined with blocky buildings of foamed meteorite ore. Most of the buildings were still dark, silent. Paul passed a construction site. Huge machines with ore spouts like mouths clawed aside meteorite debris and sprayed out floors and walls. The cold air was filled with dust, the stink of machine oil -- and an incongruous tang of fresh-cut wood. Four workmen stalked around the site, shouting at the huge devices which did their bidding.

Taft and Green had paused at the knee-high lip of a light well. Paul joined them and peered into the well. The exposed surface of the Sugar Lump, twenty feet down, was a shining disc. A beam of light thrust straight up from the well and splashed against curved mirrors above their heads, illuminating the surrounding streets.

Shadows passed beneath the exposed plane like fish in a light-filled pond.

The sky was blue-black. Above the City's thin layer of air Spline warships prowled, visibly spherical.

Paul felt he was floating, suspended between mysteries above and below.

"Coexistence with the Xeelee," Taft was saying. "That's what the colony is about. The meteorite impact which smeared rock over this Face of the Lump was a miraculous break. By terraforming this region and colonizing it we can prove to the Xeelee we don't have to go to war with them." He was a tall, heavily-built man of about physical-forty; the well's under-lighting gave his bearded face a demonic power, and when his metallic Eyes fixed on him, Paul felt a psychic shock.

"And isn't your mysterious waif here going to endanger that?" Taft demanded.

...And one day, Paul realized, this man would try to kill him. He edged closer to Commander Green.

Green interposed his short, blocky frame between Taft and Paul. Well light glittered from his ornate Navy epaulets. "Your colonization project isn't under question at present, Dr. Taft," he said briskly.

"Isn't it?" Taft raised bushy eyebrows. "Then call off your Spline war dogs. Spend your resources on my terraforming efforts down here."

Green spread callused hands. "Let's stick to the point, shall we? You know I don't have the authority to call off the exclusion fleet. And those who do are unlikely to withdraw as long as there's so much mystery, so much threat associated with the Sugar Lump."

Taft snorted. "Threat? The government acts like a bunch of superstitious fools every time the Xeelee are mentioned. Look, Green, we've made a lot of progress. We've established that the Lump is an artifact, fabricated from Xeelee construction material--"

"And that's about all you have established," Green said with a touch of steel. "Despite the money you've spent so far."