"Wha...." He gulped his adam's apple back down into his throat. "How did you get that into the Park? The force screens aren't supposed to pass weapons." "There are ways, Citizen," the man said, grinning. No longer did he seem clownish. "Many so-called impossible things are quite simple, if only you have access to the proper people and controls." "What do you really want?" Lund tried to hide his fright, but he was uncomfortably certain that it was radiating out from him, broadcasting to the entire world that Citizen Lund was scared silly. "I told you, Citizen. You must not present your plans to the Conference." "But why?" he wailed, in frustration. "Give me a logical reason!" "The greater good, Citizen." With those cryptic words, the man pressed the stud of the beamer. Lund gasped, as a giant hand closed around his heart, then collapsed to the ground in a strange dying parody of slow motion. Just before the clouds of eternity shut away his vision, he at last recognized the man. Himself! II John Reilly was tired, intensely tired, beyond any feeling of exhaustion he had ever known. The clock in his desk chimed once. He sighed and picked up his lecture notes, stuffing them into a scarred and battered case that he had been carrying since his student days at the Academy. He cast one weary glance around the cluttered office, then steeled himself into a passable imitation of military carriage as he left for the lecture hall. The Cadet Sergeant-Major outside his door leaped to attention only a little less quickly than his regular service counterpart. Reilly returned their salutes and fell in behind them. The lecture hall--gymnasium, really; the Academy was perennially overcrowded--was crowded, as usual. The eager young cadets filled the fifty rows of backless benches, while the overflow squatted and stood at the rear until it was impossible for a midget to find room to thread his way through the crowd. Reilly's class was well-tended for its honest popularity, not just because it was compulsory. There were many "compulsory" lectures in the curriculum that counted themselves proud to find half their audience in attendance. Reilly stopped in the wings of the stage, listening for a moment to the comfortable discordances of the student band tuning their instruments. The regular service non-com peered through the hangings, catching the bandmaster's eye. The tuning stopped, and the band swung into a medley of old Academy drinking songs. Reilly smiled, as he remembered happier days when he had participated lustily in the drinking that went along with such music.