rescue parties followed.

I let them go. For my own part, I couldn't leave. Not quite yet.

The last stragglers disappeared. The echoes died. Aching with weariness, I began my own bleakly purposeful tour of inspection.

A dozen times, I lost my way in the maze of rooms and shafts and intersecting passages. A hundred—a thousand—I came upon strange sights, alien things my human mind could never hope to fathom.

Now fatigue bore me down till I had to stop and lean against a wall to rest. I began to wonder if I'd come on a fool's errand.

Then, close to the globeship's exit hatch, I glimpsed a narrow storage niche—a niche stacked high with neat oblong cases.

Fibrox transit boxes.

Involuntarily, my breathing quickened. Dragging down the nearest box, I ripped it open.

A folded paper fell to the floor: a cargo manifest.

I clawed it up ... fumbled it open with fingers numb and stiff as sticks.

And there was the stamp, the familiar scarlet label:

CLASSIFIED FEDGOV SECURITY SUPPLIES! PORT INSPECTION FORBIDDEN

—The label that would permit these boxes to pass customs checks at any port on any planet, throughout FedGov Security's whole far-flung field of operations.

I turned back to the case itself and tugged out one of the smaller boxes within ... tore off its wrapper, read the nameplate: 'Apex Perceptual Intensifier'.

Behind me, Celeste Stelpa asked, "Who is it from, Mark?"

I whirled, already crouching. "What are you doing here?"

Her wan smile didn't change. "Waiting for you, of course." And then: "You see—I knew you wouldn't go till you'd run this down. There's still too much of your hate left in you."

"Oh?"

"Hate's that way, Mark, when you displace it. Even if you win one fight, you've got to turn around and hunt another. Because the thing you fight isn't the thing you're really trying to destroy."

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