Five years after Jan Shortmire's death, the intercom on Peter Hubbard's desk buzzed and his secretary's voice--his was one of the few legal offices wealthy enough to afford human help--said, "Mr. Emrys Shortmire to see you, sir." How could a man come from so many light-years' distance without radioing on ahead, or at least tele-calling from his hotel? Dignity demanded that Hubbard tell his secretary to inform Shortmire that he never saw anyone without an appointment. Curiosity won. "Ask him to come in," he said. The door slid open. Hubbard started to rise, with the old-fashioned courtesy of a family lawyer. But he never made it. He sat, frozen with shock, staring at the man in the doorway. Because Emrys Shortmire wasn't a man; he was a boy. He might have been a stripling of thirty, except for his eyes. Copper-bright and copper-hard they were, too hard for a boy's. Give him forty, even forty-five, that would still have made Jan Shortmire a father when he was nearly a hundred and twenty. The longevity treatment produced remarkable results, but none that fantastic. Though health and strength could be restored, fertility, like youth, once vanished was gone forever. Yet the boy looked too sophisticated to have made a stupid mistake like that, if he were an imposter. More important, he _looked_ like Jan Shortmire--not the Shortmire whom Hubbard had known, but the broad-shouldered youth of the early pictures, golden of hair and skin and eyes, almost classical in feature and build. Plastic surgery could have converted a fleeting resemblance to a precise one, yet, somehow, Hubbard _felt_ that this was flesh and blood of the old man's. "You're very like your father," he said, inaccurately: Emrys was less like his father than he should have been, given that startling identity of physique. "Am I?" The boy smiled. "I never knew him. Of course, I know I look like the pictures, but pictures never tell much, do they?" He had many papers to give Peter Hubbard. Too many; no honest man had his life so well in order. But then Emrys' honesty was not the issue, only his identity. The birth certificate said he had been born on Clergal fifty-five years before, so he was ten years older than Hubbard's wildest estimate. A young man, but not a boy--a man of full maturity, but still too young to be, normally, Jan Shortmire's son. Then Hubbard opened Emrys Shortmire's passport and received another shock. He tried to sound calm. "I see you were on Morethis the same time your father was!" Emrys' smile widened. "Curious coincidence, wasn't it?" A surge of almost physical dislike filled the lawyer. "Is that all it was--a coincidence?" "Are you suggesting that I pushed my father into the Ekkan?" Emrys asked pleasantly. "Certainly not!" Hubbard was indignant at the thought that he, as a lawyer, would have voiced such a suspicion, even if it had occurred to him. "I thought you two might have arranged to meet on Morethis."