For Walt Liebscher, the elfish Puck of science fiction for over forty years. Those who haven’t met him or read him have been missing something unique and wonderful.

There is nothing quite like the sensation of calling your worst enemy up for a friendly little chat. The face appeared on the little screen, although such communication often dispensed with visuals. In this case, both sides were curious to see what the other looked like.

He looked at the face on that screen and understood immediately why everyone who had seen it feared it. It was the handsome face of a man in middle age, trim, lean, and somewhat military, but the eyes got you right away. They seemed hollowed, like a skull’s eyes, yet not empty—they burned with an undefinable something that seemed both eerie and impossible.

“Yatek Morah here,” said the man with the strange eyes. “Who are you and why do you demand to speak to me?”

The man on the other end gave a slight smile. He was on a huge floating city in space, a picket ship and base camp for those who guarded the four prison worlds of the Warden Diamond, a third of a light-year out and beyond the range of the Warden’s own peculiar weapons. “I think you know who I am,” he told Morah.

The strange man’s brow furrowed a bit in puzzlement, but, suddenly, he nodded and gave a slight smile of his own. “So the puppet master is finally out in the open.”

“Look who’s talking!”

Morah gave a slight shrug. “So what is it you wish of me?”

“I’m trying to save a minimum of fifty or sixty million lives—including your own,” he told the man with the burning eyes. “Perhaps a great many more than that.”

Morah’s smile widened. “Are you certain that it is we who are in danger? Or, in fact, that anyone is.”