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Alpha Centauri seventy-five years later, nothing happened."
    "Naturally," Tylar interjected. "As in our universe, Alpha Centauri has no displacement points in the current epoch. Clearly, the alternate Realm of Tarzhgul had not discovered the continuous-displacement drive in the twenty-sixth century, and still has not in the twenty-ninth.
    "But," he continued somberly, "that is no guarantee for the future. The continuous-displacement drive is merely an application of the same gravitic technology that allows displacement-point transit. No matter how uninventive the Korvaasha of Tarzhgul are, they'll stumble onto it eventually.
    And they'll remember the hitherto-inaccessible human colony at Alpha Centauri."
    "Even if they never discover it," Artorius interjected, "don't forget the other Korvaash successor-state that's come to light in Robert's era. It must also exist in the alternate universe. And those Korvaasha are more inventive than they're supposed to be! I may as well tell you, Robert, that they don't have the drive in your time. But with no Pan-Human League to run up against, they're bound to discover it eventually. For all we know, they've already discovered it by Andreas' lifetime and are gradually expanding toward an inevitable meeting with the Realm of Tarzhgul. Whether that meeting results in amalgamation or war makes no difference to Andreas' people. They're living on borrowed time."
    Andreas' face gleamed with a sheen of sweat in the simulated sunlight and he licked his lips before continuing. "We didn't know any of this, of course. But for the entire two centuries since the landfall on Chiron—that's what we call the third planet of Alpha Centauri A—our lives have been built around preparation for the eventual arrival of the Korvaasha. Among other things, we've tried to develop a means of faster-than-light travel. But we've never discovered the secret of artificial gravity; that's one of the many ways in which our courses of development have differed since your timeline branched off." He looked around at the other three as though challenging anyone to take exception to that particular phraseology, but no one did. "Our efforts were aimed at translating a ship into a parallel space in which the speed of light was higher, or ignorable altogether."
    "Oho!" Sarnac smiled. "The old 'hyperspace' idea. It was a favorite with Terran science-fiction writers before the discovery of displacement points."
    "The Chironites were wrong about faster-than-light travel," Tylar said. "But in pursuing their erroneous theory they blundered onto something concerning which not even my people have ever had an inkling: the ability to access an alternate reality. Tell him what happened, Andreas."
    "Theory predicted that our experimental drive would not work deep in a gravity well, so the experiments were carried on in the outer reaches of the Alpha Centauri system. At last a robot probe was launched—with apparent success, for it vanished and later reappeared on schedule at the same location. But its recorded data showed that it had emerged in exactly the same spot in the outer Alpha Centauri system! But not the same Alpha Centauri system, for all the regular communications channels were dead. Instead, there was an enormous volume of incomprehensible broadcasts from Chiron."
    Lirauva , Sarnac mentally corrected him. That's what we call Alpha Centauri A III, because Varien hle'Morna's daughter Aelanni named it that when she used it as her base for studying twenty-first-century Earth, back in the days when Alpha Centauri had a displacement point. Nowadays, being a nice place and just a short continuous-displacement hop from Sol, it's a rapidly growing colony. What will it be like in the twenty-ninth century?
    "At first we thought we had inadvertently discovered time travel," Andreas was saying. "But the probe's photographic record showed absolutely no difference in the relative positions of the stars. Only one conclusion was possible: our