That's an old saying in the Explorers. I never believed it before. It never really hit me.

Never again. You never really realize what never means. It's a word you use all the time, but it means... it means never. NEVER. Not in all the millions of billions of trillions of it....

Get hold of yourself, dammit!

Everything on this planet had changed, but not the pattern of the Explorer Ship: it was lighted now from inside, and outlined in silver; a chained Titan, shadowed against the dark mass of the mountain that rose behind the new city.

The city was still raw, a mass of beams and scars in the wounded red clay of the planet's surface. Gildoran had first seen the great ship outlined against the mountain two years ago, planetside time--before the city had risen there, before anything had risen there--and every day since, but now it felt as if he hadn't ever seen it before.

There were strange sharp edges on everything, as if the air had dissolved and he saw them hard-edged in space.

Never again. I was a fool to think anything could be different.

How could Janni have done this to me?

I thought she was different. Every fool kid thinks that about the first woman he cares about.

Gildoran passed through the gates. They were still guarded, but that was only a formality. On every planet Gildoran had known--he could remember four in twenty-two years of biological time--the earthworms kept away from Explorer ships.

I took Janni. I thought she'd have to feel the way I did. Wonder, and awe. But she was bored. I should have known then, but instead I was flattered, I thought it was just that she'd rather be alone with me. Maybe she would. Then. That seems a long time ago now.

The guard didn't bother checking the offered ident disk. It was a formality anyhow. Gildoran's identity was on his face, like all Explorers. He knew what was whispered about them, but lifelong training made it beneath Gildoran's dignity to notice it or seem to remember it.

But I remember. Keep away, they say. Keep away from the Explorers. Keep your children away. They'll steal your children, steal your women.

I wouldn't have stolen Janni. But I might have stayed with her.

He walked with the arrogant pride of all the Explorers, conscious, and proud, of the differences that set him off --set him off cruelly, a planetman might have said--from the rest of the swarming humanity around the city, the crews working to load the ships. He stood seven feet seven, although he was tall even for an Explorer, due to a childhood and youth spent at minimal gravity. The white--paper-white--skin and bleached white hair were colorless from years of hard radiation. He knew there were other differences, bone-deep, marrow-deep, cell-deep. Gene-deep. He never thought about them. But he had known from childhood that no one else ever forgot them.

Janni hadn't forgotten them.

Not for a moment.

The crews around the ship parted to let him through, edging faintly back as he passed. But this was at the edge of his consciousness. He would only have noticed it if they hadn't.

Had she only wanted an exotic? Was it only his strangeness that had attracted her? Not romance, but a perverse desire for the bizarre, the alien, the freakish?

Did women like Janni boast of an Explorer lover, as they might boast the romantic conquest of a gladiator from Vega 16?

Gildoran, feeling faintly sick, moved toward the refuge of the ship.

It's beautiful, more beautiful than anything else they'll ever build here. But it doesn't belong, and neither do I, and now I know it.

Behind him the new city was swarming with life, multiplex human, parahuman and nonhuman life, the life of a Galaxy which had achieved the Transmitter and was no longer limited anywhere by space or time. Life showed all sizes, shapes, colors and integuments. Isolation and differences had vanished. All through history, from the first stirrings of consciousness in man and non-man, transportation--of people, of goods and services and ideas--had been the one bottleneck jamming mankind to an even rate of growth. But with the advent of the Transmitter, consciousness in the Galaxy had outstripped that limitation, and now there were no such limitations.

Or only one limitation. The speed of the Explorers.

Without us, none of this would be here...

But we're still the freaks. We live in time and distance. They live free of them.

But only because of us.

The hint of a new planet to be opened, a new world to be developed and explored, the creation of new labor markets, new projects and products, new work of every kind from running ditch-digging machines to selling women for use and pleasure, had brought them swarming here from the first minute the Transmitter booths had been hooked into the Galactic network. Right here in the city behind him there were big red men from Antares and small bluish men from Aldebaran, furred men from Corona Borealis Six and scaly men from Vega 14, and there were women to match all of them and more. Every new, just-opened world was like this. A carnival of new life for the young, of second - or third, or twenty-third - chances for the old; for the misfits, the excitement-seekers, the successes wanting new worlds to conquer and the failures who hadn't lost hope that this time they'd make it big.

But Gildoran walked through it, indifferent. He didn't bother looking back at the city.

There's nothing there for me now. There never was. Only Janni, and I know now she was never really there. Not for me.

He had no part in this world anymore. Once the Transmitter was set up on any world, the Explorers were finished with it. The Explorer ship which had found the world, explored it, subdued it sufficiently to build a Transmitter there, officially opened it, had nothing left to do. Nothing, that is, except to collect their tremendous fee from Head Centre, and lift off to find another one. The Gypsy Moth had been here for a year and a half. It was time to move on.

There are other worlds out there, waiting. Plenty of them.

Yes, damn it, and women on all of them.