A sneer flickered across the old man's face. "It's only fifty light-years away, Sammy. The nearest astrophysical enigma to Human Space. And you ball-less Qeng Ho wonders have never visited it. Holy profit is all your kind ever cared about." He waved his right hand forgivingly, while his left dug deeper into the blankets. "But then, the whole human race is just as bad. Eight thousand years of telescope observations and two botched fly-throughs, that's all the wonder rated....I thought maybe this close, I could put together a manned mission. Maybe I would find something there, an edge.Then, whenI came back— " The strange glitter was back in his eyes. He had dreamed his impossible dream so long, it had consumed him. And Sammy realized that The Man was not a fragment of himself. He was simply mad.

But debts owed to a madman are still real debts.

Sammy leaned a little closer. "You could have done it. I understand that a starship passed through here when ‘Bidwel Ducanh' was at the height of his influence."

"That was Qeng Ho. Fuck the Qeng Ho! I have washed my hands of you." His left arm was no longer probing. Apparently, he had found his handgun.

Sammy reached out and lightly touched the blankets that hid The Man's left arm. It wasn't a forcible restraint, but an acknowledgment...and a request for a moment's more time. "Pham. There's reason to go to OnOff now. Even by Qeng Ho standards."

"Huh?" Sammy couldn't tell if it was the touch, or his words, or the name that had been unspoken for so long—but something briefly held the old man still and listening.

"Three years ago, while we were still backing into here, the Trilanders picked up emissions from near the OnOff star. It was spark-gap radio, like a fallen civilization might invent if it had totally lost its technological history. We've run out our own antenna arrays, and done our own analysis. The emissions are like manual Morse code, except human hands and human reflexes would never have quite this rhythm."