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detained.”
    Visibly shaken, Katherine huddled against the wall of the vehicle. “This is insane. Why didn’t you find some way to tell me! And how did you know, when no one else did?” I know that he couldn’t have told me. Why am I being so unreasonable? Wasn’t there some way he could have suggested . . . no. Did he even try?
    Herm shifted uneasily on the bench. All his hens and chickens were going to come home to roost, much sooner than he wished, it seemed. He should have told Kate the truth years before, but there had never been just the right moment for the revelation. Or so he had convinced himself. He would have to lie—again. And he was so tired that it seemed impossible. “I was warned by a clerk of the Premier’s I have been cultivating,” he answered, surprised his voice did not quiver at all. There was a clerk whom he had gotten information from in the past, a pretty woman who liked to flirt with him. He had never been unfaithful to Katherine, but he had skirted the edges of it more than once for political reasons.
    “And you could not tell me?”
    “No. I could not put you and the children at risk—there are too many listening devices in too many places, dearest.” She knew that personal privacy had nearly vanished in recent years, and was aware that their apartments were not safe, but she was not in a mood to be mollified. It was not just the Security Forces either, although they were the most obvious spies. There were other groups, covert bunches of shadowy people, nameless and faceless, who nurtured their own suspicions of the Senator from Darkover and anyone else whom they did not own. He had found hints of them in the unguarded thoughts of clerks who were nothing of the sort, as well as in those of his fellow legislators. Herm wondered if the Expansionist Party knew that there were traitors in their midst, plotting for power over the decadent Federation. It did not matter any longer, did it? They could all plot themselves to perdition, for all he cared. By Aldones, he was tired!
    As a Senator, Herm had taken a different tack than that of his predecessor, Lew Alton, and cunningly played at being a bon vivant, a pleasant fellow who could be bought occasionally. For Herm did not possess Lew’s gift of forced rapport—could not bend minds to his bidding—which he knew that Lew had done more than once, with great subtlety and not a little remorse. But Lew had used what he had, and paid the price. Lew’s powers had cost him a great deal, and he had been a heavy drinker during the years Herm had known him. He wondered if he still was.
    Instead of force, Herm used deviousness. For the most part he had managed to keep Darkover from becoming a planet that demanded attention, that appeared as a threat in any way. It had not been easy, for the paranoia of the Expansionists now bordered on obsession. They saw enemies everywhere, and many of them sincerely believed that Protected Planets were getting away with something. They were never able to define exactly what that “something” was, but that did not keep them from thinking that they were being cheated somehow.
    Herm had fought with his own peculiar talents, pretending that Darkover was just a backward planet, poor in the metals that might be useful for building ships or armaments, barely able to provide enough food to feed its inhabitants. He painted a portrait of an impoverished world, and Darkover was far away and still obscure enough that few had inquired too closely. During Lew’s term as Senator, he had cleverly managed to get a great deal of information about Darkover either suppressed or classified in some fashion, so that access to it was limited. And thankfully, Darkover did not have any particular strategic value, although that might change soon. If the Federation fell apart, or split into factions, who knows what the future might hold?
    The real problem was in the mind-set of the Expansionists themselves. They imagined enemies