Uh-oh. Mac rarely said anything good about anybody. “How’d it go?”

“I don’t want to prejudice you. But you should take a look.”

Hutch sighed. “Who was the pilot?”

“Valya,” he said.

She told Marla to find it and put it up. Moments later, the office darkened, and Marge Dowling did the introduction for her show. Then she brought out Valya. Then MacAllister swaggered into view. Somehow he always contrived to make an entrance. She didn’t like any of her people going up against MacAllister. At least Valya would have been about as strong an advocate as the Academy could have produced out of its pilot corps. But MacAllister was a professional assassin. Arguing with him always left you running downhill in front of an avalanche.

Dowling started by reviewing the Heffernan situation. Hutch fast-forwarded through it until she saw the discussion begin with a question to Valya. How safe were the starships?

Absolutely safe, Valya insisted, while Mac contrived to look as if she wanted everyone to believe in fairies. “We’ve done the important stuff,” Mac said a few minutes later. “We’ve taken a good look at the neighborhood we live in, we got rid of the cloud that was headed our way, and we’ve allowed our academics to fill their computers with data nobody will ever use. It costs a lot of money to run back and forth to Orion’s belt — ”

“We haven’t gotten that far yet — ” said Valya.

“Wherever. It’s time to come home and fix the problems we have here. It’s time to grow up.” She froze the picture. MacAllister sat there, mouth open, index finger pointing at the ceiling, a model of rectitude and conviction, going on about spending billions and getting nothing back. She picked up a paperweight, a brass model of the Wildside, and tossed it at him. It passed through his left shoulder.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER Marla informed her she had a visitor. Nobody was scheduled until two thirty, when she was supposed to sit down with representatives from two laboratories who’d gotten into a battle over scheduling priorities. “Who is it?” she asked.

“Harry Everett.”

Everett was a Native American, the pilot with whom she’d made her qualifying flight at the beginning of her career. The guy who’d told her she had a responsibility to do more than deliver researchers to their target sites. She’d never forgotten his comment, made while they orbited Terranova out at 36 Ophiuchi, the first world discovered to have multicellular life-forms. “If they’re going groundside,” he’d told her, looking down at the planet’s lush green continents, “you need to stay with them, mentally, and maybe physically as well. They will have a tendency to forget how dangerous some of these places can be.”

“I’ve got it, Marla.” She strode through the door into the outer office. Everett was standing in his dark blue uniform, looking a bit older than the last time she’d seen him. But still pretty good.

He wasn’t smiling.

She put out her hand. “Glad to see you, Harry,” she said. “It’s been a long time.”

He looked at the hand. Looked at her. “I used to get a hug,” he said.

Forgot. Directors don’t go around hugging the help. “Got out of the habit, I guess.” She embraced him, but he didn’t cooperate much. “What’s wrong, Harry?”

“You have a minute?”

“For you? Sure. Always.” She led him back into the office and closed the door. “How’s Annie?” His daughter, product of a marriage long gone south.

“She’s good,” he said. “She’s married now. I’m a grandfather.”

“Congratulations.” She got coffee for them, and they sat down. “I take it this isn’t social.”

“No.”

Okay. She could guess the rest. “The Heffernan.”

He nodded. “How could you let that happen?”

Everett was a head taller than Hutch. More than a head. There was something in his dark eyes that let her know that she might be the director of operations, but to him she was still a twenty-two-year-old neophyte pilot. “Harry,” she said, “there’s a problem with money. We’re doing everything we can.”

The eyes never left her. “You’ve got a whole squadron of unsafe ships out there.”

“I know.”

“You were running on pure luck. What’s happening right now was inevitable. What the hell’s the point of your getting this kind of office” — he glanced around — “this kind of authority, if you don’t step in to help your people?”

Hutch could hear voices outside somewhere. Kids. In the park. And a dog barking.

Everett sat without moving.

“The only alternative we have right now,” she said, finally, “would be to shut down a sizable piece of the program. How would the pilots respond if the workload was cut by a third?”

“There’s another option.”

“And what would that be?”

He looked puzzled, as if she’d said something completely off the wall. “What in hell’s happened to you, Hutch? Do I really have to explain it? You’ve been sitting quietly while the Academy hangs us out there. You’re not getting the funding? What about making some noise? How about putting up a fight? Or have you forgotten how?”

We’ve satisfied our curiosity about the local stellar neighborhood. What is perhaps more important, we now know that the mere attainment of technological achievement does not guarantee species survival, and may indeed contribute to our eventual termination.

The lesson to be taken from our experience so far is that we need to wake up, to recognize that we are at risk, not only from cosmic forces over which we have limited control at best, like the omega clouds, but also from the unfettered development of science. Unfortunately, technology brings with it enormous risks that, until recently, we’ve been reluctant to face. The runaway greenhouse explosion comes immediately to mind. There are other hazards, which we would do well to take seriously.

— Paris Today, Tuesday, February 17

Freedom sounds good. Freedom of religion. The right to privacy. The right to protest when you don’t like the way things are going. Unfortunately, all these benevolences assume a mature, rational population, because they can be powerful weapons when misused. Freedom and idiots make a volatile mix. And the sad truth is that the idiocy quotient in the general population is alarmingly high.

— Gregory MacAllister, Editor-at-Large

MacAllister rapped his baton several times on the lectern, exactly as he’d seen it done by the conductor of the Geneva Philharmonic. The vast concert hall fell silent. He glanced around at the hunched figures arranged across the stage, illuminated only by the pivot lamps on their music stands. Behind him, the audience waited. Someone coughed.

He felt the tension of the moment, as one always does during those last seconds before the performance begins. He gazed over at the violins and signaled them to start.

The opening strains of Kornikov’s Charge of the Cossacks stirred, as if something in the night were just awakening. MacAllister summoned it forth, listened to it gather strength, felt it flow past the dimmed lights out into the audience. He knew its power, knew also that he controlled it, that it reacted to his baton, and to his fingertips.

He signaled the oboes, and the wind began to pick up. It blew mournfully across the steppe, gradually resolving itself into the sound of approaching cavalry. They came, the hoof-beats rising to a crescendo that at last shook the sky. MacAllister leaped onto his gray steed, Alyosha, his companion in a thousand battles, and joined them. He was draped in fur, an ammunition belt slung over one shoulder, a musket strapped to the animal’s flank. They moved through the night while the moonlight glittered against their weapons, and the viols sang.

He brought in the brass with a clamor, and they erupted in full gallop toward a hidden enemy. Toward women and children held captive. Toward invaders of the mother country.

Born to be a Cossack.

APPLAUSE ROLLED THROUGH the night. MacAllister generously pointed his baton toward the orchestra, and the noise went up a few decibels. He bowed and looked up to the boxes on his left. To Jenny’s box. He hadn’t programmed her in, never programmed her in, but it didn’t matter. She was there, and he saw her, gazing down at him, wearing one of the dark blue gowns she always wore on formal occasions. Then the curtain dropped and Tilly put the table lamp on and he was back in his living room.

“Very good, sir,” Tilly said, in his deep baritone. “An outstanding performance.” There was a hint of mockery in the AI’s comment, but that was okay. Tilly knew it was more or less expected.

He would have liked to reopen the curtain. To invite Jenny down to join him. And in fact it was possible. He could have her stroll across the stage and draw up a chair and sit and talk with him in her New England accent. He could send the rest of the audience home while they reminisced about the old days. He’d married late. He’d never expected to meet a woman to be taken seriously until Jenny erupted into his life.

Irreplaceable.

He’d always owned a reputation as something of a chauvinist. It wasn’t really true, of course. It was simply that he was a realist. He understood that women were, for the most part, not talented. Rule out the intersection of their anatomical attributes and his hormones, and they had little to offer. But he also understood that the great bulk of the male population were also vapid, easily led, dreary creatures. If Hutch got her wish, and we did one day encounter truly intelligent aliens, whom would we send to speak with them? To impress them with our capabilities? A politician? A college professor? Best, probably, would be a plumber. Someone lacking too high an opinion of himself.

Jenny had been a graduate student from Boston University, doing a research paper on him. She’d shown up out of the blue to watch him do a presentation at Colonial Hall in Boston. His subject had been “Your Future and Welcome to It.” She’d sat up front, but, incredibly, he hadn’t noticed her until she’d come to him afterward, patiently waiting while others presented books for his signature, shook his hand, and tried to ingratiate themselves. And then she’d been standing there, dark eyes, dark hair, shy smile. And the rest, as they say, was history.

They’d had three years.

MacAllister had lived, on the whole, a happy life. He’d accomplished, and in fact far exceeded, his childhood ambitions. He’d become a celebrated figure and a renowned editor. He’d won every major nonfiction literary and journalistic prize. He was accorded VIP status wherever he went, and he was proud of his enemies, who were the self-righteous, the arrogant, the uplifters who wanted to direct the way everybody else did things. During the course of those early years, he’d maintained that love was an illusion generated by chemistry and biological processes. That a man was far better off to resist the urge to mate. And then he’d met Jenny.