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“We don’t know who he was,” Arn
replied reluctantly.

“Excuse me?” Iris chimed in, “We
have a total adult
Homo sapiens
population of just under five thousand. It can’t be all that hard to figure out
who it was by the process of elimination.”

“That’s just it,” Arn shook his
head, “neither fingerprint nor photographic analysis managed to find a match
with any of our people. No one knows him. It’s as though he just arrived from
some other nation’s version of Project Van Winkle.

“It’s possible,” Arn continued,
“but not very likely. First of all, you have to convince me that anyone other
than the United States had stasis technology.”

Park shrugged, but took the
challenge. “At the time we went under? I seriously doubt it. But even the
States couldn’t mount the project alone. It took all of NATO, the European
Alliance, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and a few others to fund the project
and we have people from all those countries. However, it has been two hundred
and fifty million years. Even if I believed a scientific discovery could only
take place once, I can’t believe that stasis field generation remained secret
for more than a century, if that, and I think it is safe to say there were many
civilizations that came and went after we went to sleep.”

“Then why doesn’t anyone in the
known parts of the galaxy have stasis technology?” Arn pressed.

“It’s a lost technology, for
sure,” Park shrugged. “It may have been found and lost a dozen times. We really
don’t even have the foggiest notion as to how history went earlier than one
million years ago and, frankly, even that is an exaggeration. Anything might
have happened over such a long time. You all know we use terms like ‘millions
of years,’ but do we really understand just how long that is? We went from the
first powered flight of the Wright Brothers, to Armstrong and Aldrin walking on
the Moon in a mere sixty-six years. How far could we go and then fall back
again in a million? Two hundred and fifty million?”

“The discovery of the stasis
field was an accident,” Arn argued. “Maybe no one else ever stumbled across
it.”

“Maybe,” Park shrugged. “No one
else seems to have it now, so that’s good for us, but okay, for the sake of
argument, let’s assume there was another Project Van Winkle somewhere about the
same time we went to sleep, give or take a couple centuries. Since they never
contacted the Mer, it would be logical to argue they woke up sometime between the
time we did and now. What are the odds they would even wake up in our
lifetimes? Why not a million years ago or more; why not another million years
from now? If power hadn’t failed we’d still be in stasis ourselves.”

“Which way are you arguing, Holman?”
one of the others demanded. Park recognized him as one of the self-appointed
politicians on the Van Winkletown council. He remembered the guy had been an
expert in animal husbandry, a specialty that had become suddenly less vital
once relations with the Mer had opened. “First you say there could be another
Van Winkle, then you claim there can’t. You can’t have it both ways.”

“Of course I can,” Park laughed.
“I was saying that it was quite possible someone else might have discovered how
to create a stasis field and had sent a population into stasis just as our
people did. I’m also arguing that the chances of their showing up now, in this
particular time and place is almost impossibly small. Furthermore, the chance
of their waking up, finding out about us and instantly wanting to kill us seems
ridiculously small to me. The two arguments are not mutually incompatible. But
has anyone thought to do DNA analysis of the assassin?”

“DNA analysis takes a while to
develop, Park, you know that,” Arn pointed out. “and we don’t have a DNA lab in
operation. We did take samples so that we could compare them to those in our
records, but it’s probably going to be a few days before we have our results.”

“I don’t think you’re going to
find a match in the Van Winkle files,” Park told him.

“But you just said that it was
impossible there were other humans of our sort who had been kept in stasis,”
the home-grown politician argued.

“True and I stand by that,” Park
told him, “but if you think about it, there is at least one group of
suprahumans who look very much like us on casual inspection.”

“The Premm,” Arn concluded. “You
think this guy was a Premm agent?”

“He may have just been an
individual fanatic,” Park pointed out, “but while there are others who might
pass for
Homo sapiens
in the
Allience, they’re the ones who are more likely to want any of us dead although
I must admit I seem to recall them saying they wanted to cleanse the Earth in
atomic fire, not laser fire.”

“The Premm can’t be completely
identical to us,” Patty pointed out. “They are a distinct species. There must
be differences.”

“That differences might be
strictly on the genetic level,” Iris countered, “But perhaps we should ask
Dannet and Sartena if they have statistics on the Premm and other Alliance
humans. It might give us something to look for.”

Sartena had already gone to sleep
and deactivated her comunications implants and so rather than waking Dannet up,
Arn decided they should all try to get some sleep. “Let’s meet in the big
conference room for breakfast. Let’s see, it’s just past Two-thirty. Make it at
Oh-Eight Hundred.” There were groans all around, but he ignored them when Park
grinned at him.

If anyone got much sleep that
night they were not members of either Arn’s or Park’s households and that was
apparent a few hours later at the breakfast Arn served in the conference room.

“There are some known differences
between Premm and
Homo sapiens
,”
Dannet explained once everyone had grabbed a plate of food and a cup of the
dark beverage that had replaced coffee. He activated one of the conference room
displays and continued, “As you can see, their arms are, on average, two
percent shorter than those of you Pirates.”

“Pirates?” one of the political
attendees bristled at the word.

“That’s the word the other humans
of the Alliance use to distinguish us,” Park explained. “Since the Battle of
Owatino it has come to mean ‘Good guys.’ As it happens, though, they do not
look so different that we could spot one easily in a crowd. Even on close
inspection the ratio of arm-to-body length is within the normal range of
H. sapiens
, although I recall Doctor
Farns telling me that the difference was enough to spot if you looked
carefully.”

“On the average, perhaps,” Iris
commented, “but individuals can vary. This one obviously was closer to our
norm.”

“Others might be closer still,”
Dannet added. “Fortunately, you will not have to start arresting people simply
because they have relatively short arms. There are other differences. They may
not be visible, but they are theoretically detectible. For example the normal
healthy body temperature of a Pirate, I understand, is 98.6 degrees as you
measure it.”

“On the Fahrenheit scale,” Park
agreed. “It’s 36.8 degrees Celsius.”

“Well, a healthy Premm’s body
temperature is 99.1,” Dannet told them. “Surely, you can rig up some infrared
scanners to detect warmer than average humans.”

“We would also detect a lot of
our own people who have a cold or some other minor illness,” Iris pointed out.

“We don’t have to shoot anyone we
detect,” Arn noted, “but it would be nice to have a more fool-proof means of
detection. Any other differences?”

“The arrangement of their
internal organs differs,” Dannet replied. “I understand you have a vestigial
organ of some sort they lack.”

‘The appendix, perhaps,” Park shrugged.
“It is not really a useless organ. It contains a reservoir of useful intestinal
bacteria, but it can be safely removed and should be if it becomes inflamed. My
own was removed when I was in grade school, but that’s not useful. Quite a few
adults of our species have had their appendices surgically removed. And even if
we wanted to scan for that, a subject would have to stand or lie still for a CT
scan or something.”

“A fluoroscope might do the
trick,” Patty suggested.

“That’s not a fast process either,”
Park told her, “and not ideal for scanning soft tissues unless you also plan to
make the subject swallow some contrast agent, like barium or silver.”

“And I would prefer not to risk
undue X-Ray exposure,” someone else in the room told them. “Shouldn’t we have
Doctor Sheetz here to advise us, though.”

“I am here,” Ronnie spoke up
irritably. All heads turned to see her working diligently with a computer pad.
“I can make a simple passive infrared scanner that will detect body heat
remotely, I suppose. It might even look like something from an old science
fiction series, but as Iris said, we’re going to get a lot of false alarms.
Maybe if we combined various detection methods. Prince Dannet, what other
differences are there between us and the Premm?”

“I’m sure you’ll find a
difference in brainwave patterns,” he told her. “It’s considered definite proof
of species on some worlds.”

“Nice to know,” Ronnie commented,
“but it’s not something I know how to detect remotely, unless you count placing
sensors on one’s skull as remote detection. Can Alliance scientists, or
doctors, I suppose, perform and EEG from a distance of, say, two or three
feet?”

“I don’t really know how such
tests are performed,” Dannet admitted. “I’ve just heard they can be done. Sartena?”

“I was a starship navigator
before getting shoved into my current ambassadorial status,” Sartena shrugged.
“Medical examinations of encephalic activity, though, tend to be done from very
close range. The further away from the subject you get, the less accurate the
readings are.”

“Well, maybe we can find some
combination of differences that can be scanned for if we place
 
something across a hallway,” Ronnie remarked,
“but I’ll need more to go on.”

“Work with Sartena and Dannet and
their people,” Arn suggested, “and see what you can come up with.”

“I still want to know how this
Premm agent, if he was an agent,” Park hedged, “managed not to stand out like a
sore thumb. As was said last night there are fewer than five thousand Van
Winkle Project veterans in the world. We all know each other, more or less…”

“I can’t name all five thousand
of us,” Arn told him. “I doubt I can recognize everyone on sight either.”

“Okay, we don’t actually all know
each other, but a strange face in town ought to have engendered comments,” Park
retorted. “People should have nudged each other and asked, ‘Who’s that?’”

“Maybe they did,” Iris told him.
“And maybe every time they did they just decided it was someone from another
part of the initial project and one with whom they just had not crossed paths
much since waking up.”

“Ah, I hate to admit it,” Arn
replied, “but security has been sloppy. We probably should have been examining
visiting aliens more closely.”

“Ultimately, that comes down to
my responsibility,” Park told him. “The failure was mine.”

“There’s enough blame to go
around,” Sartenna interrupted them. “Whoever that Premm was, he had to have
arrived on an Alliance ship. We don’t have so many Pirates roaming freely on
commercial ships that one should have come through unnoticed.”

“He was probably in disguise,”
Taodore Waisaw spoke up for the first time since the meeting had started.
Taodore was Marisea’s father and also the Mer ambassador to Van Winkletown. “I
doubt it would take much. He might have dyed his hair or skin. Or he might have
applied the same sort of prosthetics an actor might to appear as a different
species of human. Since no one would have scanned him for his actual species…”
he trailed off.

“For that matter,” Park put in,
has anyone thought to make sure this guy was really Premm and not just someone
in a Pirate costume.”

“Wrong time of the year for
‘Trick or Treats,’” Arn grumbled. “I’ll send a note down to the morgue, though.
We may as well take that guy apart and see what used to make him tick and if he
was in disguise we’ll find that out as well. Damn! But I never thought the
Premm would try to infiltrate us. Not when their stated mission is to bomb us
with hellfire.”

Park was overseeing the
installation of Ronnie’s prototype scanner at the Van Winkle Aerospaceport
several days later when the news arrived of the murder of the Prime of Risto at
the hands of an apparent human. “We should have known the attempt on Arn’s life
wouldn’t be an isolated incident,” he told Iris when she called with the news.

“The Mer newscasters aren’t sure
how to handle the story yet,” Iris commented. “They keep trying to spin it
first one way then another.”

“I’m not worried about news
casters regardless of their species,” Park told her seriously.

“You should be,” she retorted.
“The average Mer listens to the news and the way it is presented influences
them. Besides, the Mer politicians are busy trying to see which way this spins
and if humans get the blame, they’ll turn on us.”

“You’re right, of course,” Park
agreed after a moment, “but I need to finish getting this screener up. If this
rig can tell one of us from a Premm we’ll want them in every port on the
planet. The part that rankles is that Lord Rebbert assured me that no two
species of human are sufficiently alike for a member of one species to
infiltrate another. I’m thinking this is yet another case in which the people
of the Alliance are too certain that something can’t be done so they see no
reason to make sure.”

“We have all noticed that the
Alliance seems to be in a state of cultural fatigue,” Iris pointed out. “Or
they were when we first encountered them. Several anthropologists have admitted
as much to me. In retrospect, I suppose it is obvious. Here we show up with
antiquated weapons and forgotten technologies and manage to carve a niche out
for ourselves.