Almost at the beginning, a week earlier, Fred Imbry had been sitting in the Sainte Marie’s briefing room for the first time in his life, having been aboard the mother ship a little less than two weeks. He sat*there staring up at Lindenhoff, whose reputation had long ago made him one of Imbry’s heroes, and hated the carefully schooled way the Assignment Officer could create the impression of a judgment and capacity he didn’t have.

Around Imbry, the other contact crewmen were listening carefully, taking notes on their thigh pads as Lindenhoffs pointer rapped the schematic diagram of the solar system they’d just moved into. Part of Imbry’s hatred was directed at them, too. Incompetents and cowards though most of them were, they still knew Lindenhoff for what he was. They’d all served under him for a long time. They’d all been exposed to his dramatics. They joked about them. But now they were sitting and listening for all the world as if Lindenhoff was what he pretended to be—the fearless, resourceful leader in command of the vast, idealistic enterprise that was embodied in the Sainte Marie. But then, the mother ship, too, and the corporation that owned her, were just as rotten at the core.

Lindenhoff was a bear of a man. He was dressed in iron-gray coveralls; squat, thick, powerful-looking, he moved back and forth on the raised platform under the schematic. With the harsh overhead lighting, his close-cropped skull looked almost bald; naked and strong, a turret set on the short, seamed pillar of his neck. A thick white scar began over his right eye, crushed down through the thick jut of his brow ridge, the mashed arch of his blunt nose, and ended on the staved-in cheekbone under his left eye. Except for the scar, his face was burned brown and leathery, and even his lips were only a different shade of brown. The bright gold color of his eyebrows and the yellow straw of his lashes came close to glowing’ in contrast.