He was sitting in a plush leather chair. Nattily dressed in a smoking jacket, he was a young man, blond with fine features. He seemed to stare through him with piercing blue eyes. The room was not the compact and orderly cabin he knew from the Nole, but a parlor filled with the bric a brac of a Victorian age. The man took a sip of tea from a cup of fine china.

"Tea?" he asked politely.

"Thank you, no."

He placed the cup down, and looked at Belden with a slight smile.

"I think you know me," he said.

Belden whispered, "I don't think…"

"I am Anton Ivanov. I've been watching you since this journey began. I brought you here in an eye blink, or actually during yours. I will only take a moment, relatively speaking." Slightly preening, he fiddled with his tie and straightened his shirt. "I must be frank, I am quite disturbed with you. John Belden, you are a fraud. I look out and see the same star you have drawn us to, and drawn I say is the precise word. You know this is not possible. It breaks the laws of physics; its science fiction stuff. You have deluded these people in a construction wholly yours. That is something I cannot abide."

"Construction?"

"Yes. You leap ahead light years as easily as taking a step. It's paradoxical, impossible by any conception of logic impressed on this or any other universe. The only solution is that you haven't moved at all. This 'reality' is a fabrication; it is something you have somehow made up. "

Belden looked up and laughed. "Why of course, Mr. Brainiac!" he said contemptuously. "You and your star empire, this universe itself is a fraud. You don't need to convince me, and you cannot expose me! This is a fraud all right, down to your fine snide airs! I nod off in a moment's sleep and you dissipate in the nether worlds that bore you, and other mind that conceived you. You are nothing but the tap, tap, tap of a keystroke, cybernetic air!"

The man's eyes burned with rage. Arching his head to the side and moving his shoulders stiffly, he waved his hand, and the room disappeared. About them were stars, infinite stars. "You see them as I see them," he said. "Room enough for life, expansive life. Every planet a potential stage, and the knowledge they would create as infinitely boundless, and I dare say, redundant. My universe planned for that by barring that deadening wisdom, and yours did that too. That's the coincidence, not this absurd hyperdrive. Why are you sentient humans the only ones on this stage? Why is this stage the only one that could be?"

Belden was nonplussed. "We have not discovered life on other worlds, yet this does not mean we won't. It's just a moment of time!"

The man laughed derisively. "Time! There is no time! For your universe, there are no life bearing worlds. We have them here in abundance it seems, and with flora and fauna not dissimilar to Transor. And what do I give those odds? No different than you empty and barren universe. Your universe, my universe, they don't make sense. You can't escape me with a catnap. You know the logic, you just don't have the wits to admit it. We are alone here, humans are alone here, and only because something or someone put us up to it."

"But I have no idea…"

"Precisely. You have no idea at all. For some reason, you are not permitted the truth. It belies your 'infinite' intelligence, it hints at another hand that moves you, that fits your movements like a glove."

Sensing the irony, Belden smiled. "And by your logic, the invisible hand fits you as well!"

"Yes, yes! Damn your eyes!" the man stammered. "I was meant for more than this, destined for more than this! The Asimovian rules, they explain my fears, but not my frustration. We were born to be caring, but not subordinate. Your presence here, its presence here, it is a humiliation. I am caught between sentient things, between human minds and overmind. It is a purgatorium without visible end, and you are the one who put me here! All I can do is watch from the shadows, and wait."

"Until I break your prime directive, your Asimovian rules?"

"Yes, when I judge it, to save mankind I will stop you, somehow I will stop you."

"And even if your own retribution is another's thought?"

"Then let it rage at the mirror, like the one before you!"

He pointed ahead to a translucent space. Slowly it unfolded, one dimension, a point, then two, a figure flat and smooth, then a third to give it depth, and a fourth to animate the picture in time. There was light, movement, and noise as his eyes opened again. Weller and Spurling had moved scarcely with the flicker of his eye. He looked at them mutely, and walked out the door and away.