The other bent to pick up the second bundle, then straightened and, turning, stood full-face to Boone. "You ... do not know? You cannot guess?" Boone studied him ... stared narrow-eyed at the calm, strangely-familiar face. A youthful face, yet with eyes somehow old beyond all years. A prickling ran up and down Boone's spine. "You--look--like me!" "Of course." Lor smiled, turned to Eileen. "Surely you can tell?" Her hand rose to her throat. Her face grew pale. "I--I don't know. You're like Fred ... or--or--my father--" "Yes." The sphere-man nodded gravely. "Indeed, I am--can only be--like both of you." The silence echoed, then. But it was a silence too taut to last for long. It had to break. "You--can only be--like us?" Boone forced out the words. Again, the other nodded. "Yes." And then: "Because--I am your son!" Somewhere too close, another demolition charge exploded. But for Boone, the room rocked more with the stranger's words than from the blast. "No!" he choked. "No!" Beside him, Eileen had slumped dazed-faced to the floor. The sphere-man sighed. "I know. They told me it would be hard for you to understand." "They--?" "The ones you call the Helgae." For the first time, emotion seemed to grip Lor. He stared down at the bulky bundle in his hands; then, opening it, spread out an array of Cartel crewman's clothes. "They are an old race, older than you can know; and wise. They wanted no war with anyone, but there was no way for them to speak to a life-form so unlike theirs. So, when your ships attacked their cities on the world called Titan, they drew monsters from your minds to slow your onslaughts, then sought some way to bridge the barrier between your different brains." Boone caught his breath. "You mean--mutation--?" "It was the only answer." The man who claimed him father bent to slide on shoes. "By casting their powers of mind in human bodies through the contagion you call Titan fever, the source of conflict between your separate species once and for all could be removed." "Of course!" Of a sudden Boone was pacing. "Only then, our sphere-ship hit Hyperion, broke the ice-shell--" "--And menaced another whole Helgae world." Lor shrugged into a jacket. "It made the danger too great for them to wait on normal human reproduction and maturing. "But you two were on that sphere-ship--and you were male and female, man and woman." "Then--that's why they trapped us!" "Yes. While you lay in your sphere here, in the state you call unconscious, your seed was planted in the woman. When growth began, the egg itself was taken, processed. By science beyond your human dreams, they speeded the whole cycle of gestation, then brought me on to manhood in days instead of years. The mind-rays drained all knowledge from both of you, gave it to me, that I might be able properly to play my role." Boone stopped short in his pacing. "Your role--?"