They were seeing the area as it had been four days earlier. Had the telescope been more efficient, they could have watched the Quagmire approach the hedgehog, could have watched Terry Drafts and Jane Collins leave their ship and descend into the spines.

Emma posted the time at the Quagmire site, late evening on the twenty-third, exactly twenty-five minutes before communications had stopped.

It was after midnight on the Heffernan. He felt weary, tired, numb, but not sleepy. While they waited he sent off a preliminary report to Serenity. No sign of the Quagmor. Continuing investigation.

They talked about the incident. Odd that they’d just vanish. You don’t think they might have just taken off? Or been grabbed by something? Sounded wild, but no stranger than simply dropping out of sight. Sky laughed at the idea, but asked Bill whether anything unusual was moving in the area.

“Negative,” said Bill.

Watching too many horror sims.

Emma gently pressed his arm. “Coming up,” she said. He was watching the time. Just a minute or so.

The cloud was, of course, invisible at that range. (He couldn’t help connecting the event with the cloud. Knew it would somehow turn out to be responsible.) But they were well away from it now. The distance between their present position and the site of the incident was seven times as great as the diameter of the solar system. “I can’t imagine what we’d expect to see at this range,” he said.

“We won’t see anything, Sky. But there’s a chance—”

“Photons,” Bill reported. “Just a sprinkle. But they were right on schedule.”

“So what’s it tell us?” asked Sky.

“Explosion,” said Em. “Big one.”

“Big enough to obliterate the ship? And the rock?”

“If we can pick up traces of it out here. Oh, yes, I’d say so.”

LIBRARY ENTRY

. Few of us now alive can remember when we looked at the stars and wondered whether we were alone. We have had faster-than-light transport for almost a half century, and if we have not yet encountered anyone with whom we can have a conversation, we know nevertheless they are out there, or have been there in the past.

More than a hundred people have given their lives to this effort. And we are now informed that, during the last fiscal year, roughly 2 percent of the world’s financial resources have gone into this exploration of the outer habitat in which we live.

Two percent.

It does not sound like much. But it could feed 90 million people for a year. Or provide housing for 120 million. It could pay all the medical costs in the NAU for sixteen months. It could provide a year’s schooling for every child on the planet.

So what do we have for our investment?

Sadly, we have nothing to put into the account books. It’s true we have improved our plumbing methods and created lighter, stronger materials. We can now pack more nourishment into a convenience meal than we ever could before. Our electronics are better. We have lightbenders, which have proved of some use in crime prevention, and also of some use to criminals. We have better clothing. Our engines are more fuel-efficient. We have learned to husband energy. But surely all of this could have been had, at far less cost, by direct investment.

Why then do we continue this quest?

It is too easy to think that we go because of the primal urge, as Tennyson said, to sail beyond the sunset.

We pretend that we are interested in taking the temperatures of distant suns, of measuring the velocity of the winds of Altair, of presiding over the birth of stars. Indeed, we have done these things.

But in the end, we are driven by a need to find someone with whom we can have a conversation. To demonstrate that we are not alone. We have already learned that there have been others before us. But they seem to have gone somewhere else. Or passed into oblivion. So the long hunt continues. And in the end, if we are successful, if we actually find somebody out there, I suspect it will be our own face that looks back at us. And they will probably be as startled as we.

— Conan Magruder

Time and Tide, 2228

University of Chicago.

Thursday, March 6.

IT HAD BEEN almost four years, but David Collingdale had neither forgotten nor forgiven the outrage at Moonlight. The sheer mindlessness of it all still ate at him, came on him sometimes in the depths of the night.

Had it been a war, or a rebellion, or anything at all with the most remote kind of purpose, he might have been able to make peace with it. There were times when he stood before his classes and someone would ask about the experience and he’d try to explain, how it had looked, how he had felt. But he still filled up, and sometimes his voice broke and he fell into a desperate silence. He was not among those who thought the omegas a force of nature. They had been designed and launched by somebody. Had he been able to gain access to that somebody, he would have gladly killed and never looked back.

A blanket of snow covered the University of Chicago campus. The walkways and the landing pads had been scooped out; otherwise, everything was buried. He sat at his desk, his class notes open before him, Vivaldi’s “Spring” from The Four Seasons drifting incongruously through the office. He’d spent the night there not because he knew the storm was coming, although he did, but simply because he sometimes enjoyed the spartan ambience of his office. Because it restored reason and purpose to the world.

The classes were into their first period. Collingdale had an appointment with a graduate student at nine thirty, leaving him just enough time to get himself in order—shower and fresh clothes—and get down to the faculty dining room for a quick breakfast.

Life should have been good there. He conducted occasional seminars, served as advisor for two doctoral candidates, wrote articles for a range of journals, worked on his memoirs, and generally enjoyed playing the campus VIP. He was beginning to get a reputation as something of an eccentric, though. He’d discovered recently that some of his colleagues thought he was a bit over the side. Believed that the experience at Moonlight had twisted him. Maybe it was true, although he would have thought intensified to be the more accurate verb. His sensitivity to the subject seemed to be growing deeper with time. He could, in fact, have wept on cue, had he wished to do so, merely by thinking about it.

He’d become sufficiently oppressed by conditions that he worried he might be having an unfortunate effect on his students. Consequently, he’d tried to resign in midsemester the year before, but the chancellor, who saw the advantage of having someone with Collingdale’s stature on the faculty, had taken him to a local watering hole for an all-night session, and he’d stayed on.

The chancellor, who was also a longtime friend, suggested a psychiatrist, but Collingdale wasn’t prepared to admit he had a problem. In fact, he had acquired an affection for his obsession. He wouldn’t have wanted to be without it.

Things got better for him this past Christmas when Mary Clank had walked into his life. Tall, angular, irrepressible, she had heard all the jokes about her name and laughed all of them off. Trade Clank for Collingdale? she’d asked the night he proposed. You must think I have a tin ear.

He loved her with as much passion as he hated the clouds.

She refused to be caught up in his moods. When he wanted to watch a sim, she insisted on a stroll through the park; when he suggested a fulfilling evening at a concert, she wanted to bounce around at the Lone Wolf.

Gradually, she became the engine driving his life. And he found the occasional day when he did not see her to be an empty time, something to be gotten through as best he could.

He’d always assumed that the romantic passions were practiced exclusively by adolescents, women, and the slow-witted. Sex he could understand. But together forever? That’s our song? It was for children. Nevertheless he’d conceived a passion for Mary Clank the first time he’d seen her—at a faculty event—and had never been able to let go. To his delight, she returned his feelings, and Collingdale became happier and more content than he had ever been.

But his natural pessimism lurked in the background and warned him she would not stay. That the day would come when he would walk into the Lone Wolf alone, or with another woman on his arm.

Enjoy her while you can, Dave. All good things are transient.

Well, maybe. But she had said yes. They hadn’t set a date, although she’d suggested that late spring would be nice. June bride and all that.

He squeezed into his shower. He had private accommodations, a bit cramped, but sufficient. Collingdale liked to think he was entitled to much more, that he was demonstrating to the university that he was really a self-effacing sort by settling for, in fact by insisting on, much less than someone in his position would customarily expect. A lot of people thought modesty a true indicator of greatness. That made it, at least, a prudent tactic.

When he’d finished he laid out fresh clothes on the bed. The sound system was running something from Haydn, but the HV was also on, the sound turned down, two people talking earnestly, and he was pulling on a shirt when he became aware that one of them was Sigmund Halvorsen, who usually got called out when a major scientific issue was in the news. He turned the volume up.

“—is unquestionably,” Halvorsen was saying in his standard lecture mode, “a group of cities directly in its path.” He was an oversize windbag from the physics department at Loyola. Mostly beard, stomach, and overbearing attitude.

The interviewer nodded and looked distressed. “Dr. Halvorsen,” he said, “this is a living civilization. Is it at risk?”

“Oh, yes. Of course. The thing is already tracking them. We don’t have much experience with the omegas, but if our analyses of these objects are correct, these creatures, whatever they are, do not have much time left.”

“When will the cloud get there?”

“I believe they’re talking about December. A couple of weeks before Christmas.” His tone suggested irony.

Collingdale hadn’t been near a newscast since the previous evening. But he knew right away what was happening.

A picture of the cloud replaced the two men. It floated in the middle of his bedroom, ugly, ominous, brainless. Malevolent. Silent. Halvorsen’s voice droned on about “a force of nature,” which showed what he knew.

“Is there anything we can do to help them?” asked the interviewer.

“At this time, I doubt it. We’re lucky it isn’t us.”