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unintentional fire." A sensor beeped, nudged the ship around a large floating chunk of torn ceramic
plating.
"Also, I am not trying to make you feel guilty. That would be impolite."
"I don't feel guilty," Alex insisted guiltily.
"That is good. I do not have the right to manipulate your emotions, no matter how worthy the cause. Let
us talk about something else." He let his gaze take in the smooth ceiling of the tunnel.
"Cheerful, roomy place," Grig said. "With air and gravity and heat it could be made almost homey. Rather
reminds me of the town I was raised in."
Alex frowned as he studied the stone tube. "This reminds you of home?"
"Oh yes." Grig made an effort to appear cheerful. "My mate and I live below ground with our sixty little
Griglings. We're very comfortable. Living below the surface of a world has many advantages, Alex.
Stable climate, unvarying scenery, the feeling of your friends constantly around you."
"Sixty, huh? That's quite a family. I guess you didn't spend all your time preparing to be a
Navigator/Monitor."
"We tend to have large families. The fertile period among us is brief, but most births that occur are
multiple. Would you like to see?"
Alex wasn't sure how he was supposed to respond. "I'm not sure I follow you."
"My family."
Alex relaxed. "Yeah, sure."
Grig fumbled with his flight suit and harness and extracted a strip of dark plastic. He ran a finger along the
right-hand edge. An image appeared on the smooth, thin surface, lit from within. As Alex watched the
picture change automatically, each of Grig's numerous offspring appearing in a predetermined sequence.
The images changed quickly and it didn't take too long to run through the entire oversized family.
When the last one had faded, Grig slipped the plastic back inside his suit.
"Very nice," Alex admitted.
"They are a joy to me," the Navigator confessed. "I have high hopes for them. That is, until Xur makes
them slaves." This was said in a flat, unemotional tone, which did nothing to lessen its impact on Alex.
"Now tell me, where do your kind live, if not beneath the undisturbed and insulating surface of your
world?"
"In houses, mostly. Caves above ground." Suddenly he shoved a hand into his right-side pocket and
removed the contents. He'd switched them from his jeans to the uniform when he'd changed clothes back
on Rylos.
Sitting in the fire control seat of a gunstar they looked very out of place. There was his wallet, with its
limp, useless currency; a few keys, some coins, a paperclip, a couple of stamps (how much was postage
from Rylos to Earth, he wondered?), and a few bits of gravel. Of all of it, he most prized the few
fragments of decomposed granite. They were pieces of home.
He returned everything to the pocket but the wallet, unsnapped the catch on the vinyl and flipped through
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the pictures as he showed them to Grig.
"See, here's where I live. And that's my family. It's a lot smaller than yours." The picture showed happy
younger children gathered around a barbecue. A smiling older man and woman stood together next to the
metal utensil. The man had his arm around the woman's shoulder while hers was around his waist.
Distant, half-remembered images of an ancient time. Even there, in that alien planetoid, they conjured up
rarely felt emotions.
"See, that's my mom and my dad before he died. The one with the wrinkled face and the dumb
expression is my little brother Louis. The girl, that's Maggie."
"Your wife?" Grig's interest was genuine as he glanced up and back toward the picture.
"Uh, no, just a friend. A very close friend." Alex swallowed hard. "My family lives above ground in a
mobile home cave that goes anyplace you want it to. Only we never went anyplace."
Grig nodded politely. Alex wondered if the gesture stood for the same thing among his people or if,
having seen Alex utilize the gesture, the Navigator was simply displaying his courtesy through the use of it.
"A mobile cave that never went anywhere. Fascinating, if something of a contradiction in terms. Why call
it mobile if it never goes anywhere?"
"That's our fault, not the trailer's," Alex explained. Aware he'd been staring at Maggie's face for a long
time, he removed the picture from his wallet and placed it on a nearby console, copying a gesture learned
from watching old black-and-white war movies. The familiar snapshot was an island of sanity among all
the smooth Rylan technology. He put the wallet back in his pocket.
"We do have caves, though. Some of them are pretty big. People used to live in them a lot. A few still
do."
"Ah, then we are not so very different."
"No, I guess not. We have a lot of below-surface caves near our trailer park. Me and Louis used to play
hide and seek in them."
"Hide and seek?"
"A kid's game. You've probably played it yourself, only you call it something else. Or else it's not
translating properly. See, one person or more runs and hides and . . ." He hesitated, thinking.
"Hide and see k," he mumbled again.
"Alex, what is it?"
"Oh, nothing, Grig. Nothing."
"Tell me. Anything worth labeling nothing has to be composed of something."
"Yeah, right. I was just thinking, though. We could hide inside this asteroid and let the Ko-Dan armada
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