“Then, as now, the Citizens loved the Probation Laws. They had no trouble forgetting the fact that they cut through every traditional Constitutional guarantee of due process. Most of them lived in countries that had never had such niceties anyway.

“And when a fluke in those laws allowed Joseph Alvarez and his friends to turn the Bureaucrats themselves out on their ears — well, the jubilant Citizens just loved Probation testing even more. It did the leaders of the Overturn no good to push the issue at the time. They were having enough trouble setting lip the Confederacy…”

Jacob thought he would scream. Here was old Uncle Jeremey gabbing on and on about all that old nonsense, and Alice — lucky Alice whose turn it was to risk the oldsters’ ire and listen in on the tap they’d placed on the house deepspace receiver — what was it she had heard!

It had to be a starship! It would be only the third of the great slow vessels ever to come back! That was the only possible explanation for the call up of the Space Reserves OF for all the excitement in the east wing, where the adults kept their labs and offices.

Jeremey was still expounding on the public’s continuing lack of compassion, but Jacob neither saw nor heard him. He kept his face rigid and still as Alice leaned over to whisper — no, gasp in her excitement — into his ear.

“…Aliens, Jacob! They’re bringing extraterrestrials! In their own ships! Oh, Jake, the Vesarius is bringing home Eatees!”

It was the first time Jacob had ever heard that word. He had often wondered if Alice was the one to coin it. ‘At ten years of age, he recalled, he had wondered if “eatee” implied that someone else was to be designated “eaten.” ’

As he drove above the streets of Tijuana it occurred to him that the question still hadn’t been answered.