When Julie came into the control room, Stan was still seated in the big, padded command chair. He had taken an ampoule of royal jelly from a dozen that were nested in the padded box on the nearby worktable. He was holding the ampoule up to one of the arc lights, twirling it between his fingers and admiring its bluish glow in the light.

As usual, Julie was both attracted and repelled by the liquid and what it could do to Stan. Yet she had been hoping they could spend this evening together, doing things together instead of thinking about them. Sometimes she thought Stan allowed himself to have real experiences only for the pleasure of reliving them later, as he was able to do with the royal jelly.

Why did he love that stuff so much? She knew it eased the pain of his disease. But it was more than just a remedy: he was using it as a drug. And Julie didn't approve of taking drugs.

She hadn't tried the stuff herself. A well-trained thief allows nothing to dull her senses. Shen Hui and life itself had taught her this lesson. And yet, much as she missed him when he launched himself into the unknown regions that the drug brought him to, a part of her went with him, because she knew how Stan felt about her.

Returning the ampoule to its case, Stan asked, "What did you think about Norbert's performance?"

"He's ready," she said. "You've done an amazing thing, Stan. Created a robot alien good enough to fool the real ones."

"Except for the pheromones," Stan pointed out.

"You've taken care of that, too. With the short-range zeta fields you've developed, plus the pheromone-altering qualities of the royal jelly, the aliens will think Norbert is one of them."

Stan nodded. "Just like it was with Ari." Stan was referring to how his cybernetic ant, Ari, had been programmed to enter the colony of a similar-looking ant species, where the other ants accepted him as the real thing.

"How close are we now, Stan?" Julie asked.

Stan punched up the computer screen in front of him. Numbers flowed across it, and lines weaved in and out and then held firm.

"We're nearing the vicinity of AR-32," Stan told her. "It's time to get the crew out of hypersleep."

"The adventure begins," Julie said softly.

"That's right." Stan took out the ampoule of royal jelly again. "We need a lot more of this stuff, and AR-32 has it for us. It's funny how a single substance can be both more valuable than diamonds and more necessary for life than water. More necessary for my life, anyhow."

He swirled the little glass tube and watched the liquid flow. Then he looked at Julie.

"You look very lovely tonight."

She smiled back mockingly. "Pretty as a shot glass, as they'd say in the Old West."

"No, I really mean it," Stan said. "You know how I feel about you, don't you?"

"Maybe I do," Julie said. "But it's not because you ever talk about it."

"I've always been shy," Stan said. Abruptly he swallowed the ampoule. I'm going to go lie down now, Julie. Let's talk more later."

Without waiting for her answer, Stan shambled off to his small office just to the right of the main control-room entrance. Within it a folding cot was built into the wall. He lay down on it now, without bothering to take off his glasses.

With Xeno-Zip there was no habituation. Each time was like the first. It always amazed him just how quickly the stuff took effect. It was like no other drug he had ever tried, neither medicinal nor recreational, and Stan had tried them all. Alien royal jelly was neither a stimulant nor a soporific, though it had effects similar to both. Primarily it was a way of gaining instant access to all parts of your own brain, a royal road to your own dreams and memories. With royal jelly you could zoom in on your past like a skilled photographer zooming in on a detail, readjusting focus to bring up those images that had faded out You could freeze the frame on what seemed like reality. You could see what you wanted to see, as often as you liked, and then step outside the frame and watch yourself in the act of seeing. Nor was that all it did. Royal jelly was a painkiller, too, relieving the throb of the cancer that was shattering his life.

The vial dropped from his fingers. It fell to the floor, taking no more than a fraction of a second to shatter on the deck. And in that microsecond, Stan watched it all happen again.