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“Not quite,” Park laughed, “They
were in stasis with us.”

“But they woke up for a
microsecond or so every once in a while. I think their combined up time is a
century or better. That’s as stable a system as anyone can build,” Ronnie
maintained.

“You’re right,” Park agreed, “and
I just didn’t think of it. Build it in any way that works best, Ronnie. I trust
you.”

“Okay,” Ronnie nodded. “Back to
the salt mines.” She smiled then. “Literally. I keep forgetting these passages
really were salt mines once.”

She strolled off, still chuckling
at her own accidental cleverness, but Marisea still had deep concerns. “Park,”
she began, “We have to do something.”

“I’m open to suggestions,” Park
nodded toward her.

“If I had a suggestion,” she
countered, “I would have made it. Park what can we do?” For a moment she seemed
like the young woman she had been when Park and Iris had met years earlier. It
reminded Park that in spite of Marisea’s normal emotional maturity, she was
still a young woman.

“I think we need to go to
Terrimi,” Iris told them, “and we should leave as absolutely as soon as
possible. While you all have been talking, the commentators have been starting
to gel on an opinion. They’re blaming us. Prime Terius has not released the
news about Premm infiltrators and some of the wilder comments are implying this
is some sort of human conspiracy.”

“A conspiracy to do what?” Arn
demanded. “I was attacked first.”

“One commentator has suggested
that the attack on you was staged,” Iris told him. “just something to make them
less suspicious before you went into action.”

“What action?” Arn shouted. “Do
they think I want to rule the whole world?”

“Could be,” Park replied, “but
Iris is right. We have to act quickly. You should get yourself in front of a
camera in the next few minutes and make a statement.”

“I haven’t written it yet,” Arn
protested.

“Work on it on the way,” Park
told him firmly. “You know what to say. We’ve been discussing it half the
morning. Say it quickly and sincerely. You can worry about working up the
rhetoric on our way to Terrimi. While you’re talking to the world the rest of
us will be packing, because as soon as you finish, we’re taking whichever ship
is on standby and be at Terius’ side by lunchtime.”

Terrimi was the second closest
large Mer settlement to Van Winkletown, but the journey there was the longest
possible given the nature of their transportation. Due to lack of fuel, the
humans no longer had any working jet planes. The two aircraft that had been
stored in the bowels of the Van Winkle base now sat in museums in Ghelati and
Senchi. The Mer had many vehicles that served a similar purpose and quite a few
landed at Van Winkleport every day. However, for one reason or another, the
humans had never purchased such vehicles for their own use. If a person needed
to get from Van Winkletown to Ristro, for example, he or she could simply buy a
ticket and be there in a two or three hours.

Such vehicles, however, were not
available for private charter on a moment’s notice so the only way Park, Arn
and their party could get anywhere on the planet in an emergency was via
spaceship.
Hannibal’s Pride
was one
of the newer ships off the lines in Questo and was primarily outfitted for
shuttle flights between Earth and the Moon. It was
 
also armed for battle should the need arise,
but most of the engineering deck had been fitted with comfortable flight chairs
and a kitchenette for preparing meals.

By policy there was always at
least one ship at Van Winkleport ready for flight. Normally, it was the ship
Park considered his own, but in his ambassadorial absence, Iris had, as Park’s
second in command, decided to rotate the duty between all the ships in the
fleet. Since Park had not been back long enough to select a new ship of his
own,
Hannibal’s Pride
had the honor
of transporting them to Terrimi.

Making such a short hop in a spaceship
was expensive and difficult. They could be handled as atmospheric craft, but
they were not as their best that way. Therefore the shortest and, ironically,
fastest way from Van Winkletown to Terrimi was by almost completely orbiting
the Earth and then landing a mere fifteen hundred miles from where the journey
had started.

None of the humans had ever
received a cold welcome from their Mer allies, but this time, even the few
smiling faces seemed forced as they walked down the stairs from
Hannibal’s Pride’s
hatch. A clamor of
reporters’ questions bombarded them all as they made their way toward the
aerospaceport terminal.

“Governor Theoday!” one shouted
over the clamor, “What do you hope to accomplish here of all places?”

“Mister Holman!” another voice
cut off any answer Arm might have made, “Is it true you are running for Prime?”

“What?” Park reacted, but he did
not have a chance to truly answer either as still more questions came at them
in rapid succession. Finally Arn put a stop to all of it by pushing forward and
into the port terminal where he knew the reporters would not be allowed to
follow.

Once the others had gotten
through the doorway, Arn turned back toward the morass of Mer reporters and
announced, “All your questions will be answered at the press conference later.”
The announcement did nothing to silence the scatter-shot questions, but Arn
knew he had been recorded and was on record as having promised a conference.
“Damned reporters,” he muttered as he and the rest of the party made their way
down the concourse.

“I’ve never seen them so rude,”
Marisea commented worriedly. She clung to Park’s arm while he carried Cousin.
Cousin was Marisea’s pet most of the time, but on entering or exiting a plane
or spaceship, the little primate insisted on being carried by Park if he was
available. Marisea worried that the large crowd might have frightened Cousin,
but she seemed calm despite the clamor.

Iris walked on Park’s other side,
but unlike Marisea she did not cling to his arm. Patty strode forward with Arn
just in front of Park, Marisea and Iris, but it was Taodore who took the lead.
“This way,” he told them confidently. I’ve arranged transport up at the front
gate.”

“How many more gauntlets like the
last one, though?” Arn muttered.

“Probably just one,” Taodore
replied. “We have laws against that sort of thing inside the actual port
buildings, and supposedly port security should keep them from interfering with
those trying to get in or out of the area, but I suspect they’re going to make
a special exception for us.”

“Yes, I’m sure we’re not at the
top of anyone’s popularity list at the moment,” Arn grumbled.

“They’re just reporters doing
their jobs,” Taodore remarked. “No one in their right mind would take them
seriously.”

“Too many people, then, are not
in their right minds,” Arn shot back.

They pushed through another crowd
at the front gate. This crowd was not all reporters, however. Most of the
people there were angry Mers who had assembled to voice their dislike for the
visiting humans. “How did they even know we were coming?” Park wondered. “It’s
not like we made any announcements.”

“Someone in flight control
probably leaked it to the press,” Iris speculated. “I must say they got here in
a hurry, but it’s a good thing we didn’t come with more notice. That crowd was
relatively well-behaved. They shouted at us, but they stayed behind the lines
like they should. We could just as easily be the focal point of a riot.”

“No more travel announcements for
the duration, then,” Arn decided. “I just hope Terius will see us. This is
going to have been a very long trip just to get the cold shoulder.”

Prime Terius, however, was happy
to see his friends as they arrived at the local Prime’s mansion. “The world is
going crazy,” he told Arn after greeting him.

“I’m just glad you didn’t have an
angry mob waiting for us on the grounds,” Arn chuckled. The remark, intended to
show lack of concern, had the opposite effect, Arn realized, but he kept his
smile firmly attached to his face.

“I don’t need a mob here anymore
than you do, my friend,” Terius assured him. “Besides, you don’t have to
convince me these assassins were not your people, but what are we going to do
about them?”

Arn let Park explain about the
Premm detectors Ronnie had designed. “They are a work in progress so we may get
some false positives at first, but the prototype worked well enough. At least
it did not detect one of our species as a Premm and it did react to a heat
source set for the standard healthy Premm body temperature. Whether they can
really detect a Premm, though, that we shall see.”

“I would like these scanners set
up in every port as soon as possible,” Terius told him.

“Doctor Sheetz doesn’t have a
production line,” Arn pointed out, “just her laboratory. She builds stuff, but
if you want a lot of them, we’ll need a factory.”

“We have factories,” Terius
assured him. “How soon can she send her plans to one?”

“I’ll ask,” Park told him. While
Arn, Terius and Taodore began to plan a press conference, Park called back to
Van Winkle Base.

“I could send them via the net at
any time, Park,” Ronnie told him after he explained what was happening. “The
mechanical design is complete. The software side of it – pattern recognition
and so forth – is likely to need changes and updates, but we can do that remotely.
I designed their interfaces to work directly with the Mer computer net, you
know. One change and it will propagate to all installed units. It’s not very
secure though.”

“What do you mean?” Park asked.

“Well, like I said, they’ll be
essentially nodes of the Mer computer network,” Ronnie explained. “I imagine
any good hacker could get past whatever encryption we chose to use.”

“We can change passwords daily,
can’t we?” Park asked.

“Sure,” Ronnie agreed, “but that
might not stop someone who monitors the data packets coming and going to the
sensors. Well, they aren’t packets like our systems used to use. More like data
chunks. Everything is based on Base Ten, so even the small packets are huge,
but it works for them and it runs fast. I think this is what the Japanese had
envisioned way back when they were working on their ‘Fifth Generation Project.’
I’m just glad I didn’t have to work out the conversions that allowed our Van
Winkle mains to interface.”

“Good thing they still use
methods that could even be converted, then,” Park told her. “I hadn’t realized
it was such a big difference.”

“Park when it comes to computers,
you just use the things,” Ronnie laughed. “Me too, for the most part, but I
have to know how the software works. In any case, they must have liked us on
first sight. Their techies dedicated a whole mega-node of their computers to
converting systems back and forth. It seems seamless to you and me, but there’s
a lot of work happening behind the scenes. Of course, we use their computers
and systems on our spaceships and at the space port, so for the most part the
old Van Winkle net is a data repository and access node for the computer pads
you and I still use. And I hear there’s a consortium of Mer businessman looking
to duplicate our pads but with their own operating system. Human stuff is
popular right now and the kids want pads like their hero, that’s you, you know,
uses.”

“We’re not
 
too popular at the moment, I fear,” Park told
her. “Seems to me the Premm are doing their best to undermine our friendship
with the Mer Nation and if you saw the reception we got when we landed you
would know they’ve done a good job of it.”

“I have faith in you and Arn,
Park,” Ronnie told him more seriously than she might normally have. “You’ll
turn this around to our advantage.”

“I think you have more confidence
in us than we do,” Park told her. “Okay, I’ll let you know where to send the
blueprints. How goes the pattern recognition tests, by the way?”

“That’s a piece of cake,” Ronnie
laughed. “I put Jao Planko on that part of the project. He knows Mer
programming better than I ever will. He grew up with it, after all. He tells me
the whole thing is modular. We can just keep feeding in patterns to recognize
and put them in either a black or white list.”

“What about belt buckles?” Park
asked. “Those are hardly standardized.”

“We are having some fun with
that,” she told him, “but there are some common shapes and remember we can scan
inside shapes as well. If the buckle is solid metal and within whatever
parameters we deem as safe, it will pass. If not, a closer inspection will tell
the tale. Besides, I’m more concerned with catching Premm assassins.”

“I just had a horrible thought,”
Park confided. “The Premm have non-Premm species allies. What if they use
them?”

“Do their human allies look like
them?” Ronnie asked. “Or us?”’

“Not exactly,” Park conceded,
“but with surgery or makeup, some might pass. I just hope the Premm haven’t
thought of that.”

“The two assassins who were
killed in their attempts were both Premm,” Ronnie told him.

“Maybe they haven’t then,” Park
told her hopefully. “Then again, the Premm have a religious mania about their
appearance. It’s probably blasphemy for another species to imitate them.”

“Is that why they hate us so
much?” Ronnie asked.

“It would probably be enough by
their lights,” Park admitted, “but it goes way deeper than that. Not only do we
predate their precious Original humans, but we are friends with the Mer, who
they have always claimed were abominations.”

“Because they are a gene-locked species,”
Ronnie recalled. “Silly thing to get hung up on. Individuals don’t evolve, only
species do and over time and who cares if they won’t evolve anyway. Isn’t the
Premm’s pride that they haven’t either?”