“Sure,” he said. “What do you need?”

“While we’re out here, I’d like to take Amy to see the supernova.”

The statement puzzled him. “How do you take somebody to see a supernova?” He looked at the quiet sky. “Where is it?”

“I’m talking about the supernova of 2216.”

That was nineteen years ago. A monster event. It had brightened the night sky for days. “How are you going to do that? We have a time machine?”

“Yes,” she said. “We can pass the light, then turn around and look at it.”

Yes. He knew that. Just hadn’t stopped to think. “Why would you want to do that?”

“Mac, it was before Amy’s time. We all got to see it, but Amy wasn’t born yet. I think she’d enjoy it, and we don’t really have to go out of our way. It’ll cost a day or so, but that’s all.”

“I keep forgetting we can do this stuff.”

“So what do you say? Is it okay? It’s on the way to our next site.”

“Sure,” he said. “No moonriders associated with it?”

“No. It’s part of the Blue Tour, but no lights have been seen near it.”

MacAllister shifted his position. “Did you ask Eric?”

“He’s all for it.”

“Okay,” he said. “Sure. I’d enjoy seeing it again.”

THEY CAME BACK together and Valya put the question to Amy. “Would you like to take a ride into the past?”

“Into the past?” she said. “How do you mean?”

“Do you know about the supernova of 2216?”

“Sure.”

“Would you like to see it?”

The child, apparently brighter than MacAllister, lit up. “Would you really do that for me?”

“If you want.”

“Sure. Thanks.”

They made the jump into the mists that evening. When it was done, MacAllister announced he’d had enough excitement for one day and headed for his compartment. Amy was doing homework, and Eric had hunched down in front of his notebook, reading.

He was glad to hit the rack, to get by himself for a few hours. That was another problem with the Salvator. Everybody needed time alone, MacAllister more than most. But he knew he couldn’t take to hanging out in his compartment for long stretches without exciting comment and resentment. You go on a trip like this, you have to be willing to socialize. So it felt especially good when night came and the ship’s lights dimmed, as they did at ten P.M., and he could justify retreating.

He settled in with Ferguson’s latest, Breakout, a history of the first twenty years of interstellar flight. But it turned out to be dreary stuff. The most rousing piece of writing in the entire book was the title. The author had done substantial research, and he wanted the reader to be impressed. Consequently he loaded every page with irrelevant dialogue and descriptions of engine thrust, even to the point of listing the supply inventories for several early flights. Nobody went to the washroom without Ferguson’s recording it.

MacAllister made a few notes and decided it deserved to be reviewed. It was his duty to warn an unsuspecting public.

AT MIDAFTERNOON THEY transited out of the mist and glided back under the stars.

“We’re about six light-years beyond 61 Cygni,” said Valya, “moving in the general direction of the galactic core. Out here, it’s not easy to be precise about distances. Can’t be sure exactly where we are.”

“Which one is it?” asked Amy, looking at the stars on the displays. “The one that’s going to explode?”

“It’s not visible to the naked eye,” said Valya. She used a marker to indicate its location. “It’s right here. Thirteen hundred light-years the other side of Sol. Out toward the rim. They figure it exploded in A.D. 946.”

The light from the event reached Earth in 2216. “I was at Princeton,” said Eric.

MacAllister had been in the second year of his marriage. He was with the Sun then, and Jenny had been teaching American history at a local high school.

The supernova had happened on a warm Tuesday evening, just after sunset. MacAllister was clearing away the dishes from dinner. Jenny had been outside talking with neighbors, and suddenly she was at the kitchen door, urging him to come out. Look at this, Mac.

He’d gone outside, expecting to discover that a flight of ducks had landed or some such thing — Jenny was forever feeding stray animals, and they came in swarms — but he was surprised to see her and his next-door neighbors staring at the sky.

Directly overhead, a star had appeared.

The sky was still much too light for stars.

The “star” got brighter as they watched.

He wondered whether it might be a comet. But there’d been no announcement to that effect.

“What is it, Mac?” she asked.

He checked with the Sun office. Nothing was happening that they knew of.

And it kept getting brighter.

The sky darkened, and other stars appeared, but none burned with the sheer intensity of whatever it was hanging over Eastern Avenue. People were coming out of their houses and standing on their lawns and in the street.

Eventually, he went back inside and made more calls. Air Transport said it was not in the atmosphere. The Wilkins Observatory seemed surprised to hear there was an anomaly. They told him they’d get back to him, but never did. He was about to call the Deep Space Lab in Kensington when the city editor at the Sun contacted him: They think it’s a nova.

By then the entire neighborhood was outside looking up. It was the only time in his entire life he’d seen something like that. Even the passing of Halley’s Comet, a couple of years earlier, had played to only a few people.

Eventually, the experts would decide it was a supernova.

EVEN AMY GOT bored while they waited. Valya showed them where the sun was; pointed out 61 Cygni, where they had been yesterday; and 36 Ophiuchi, where they would be tomorrow. Both were dim, even at close range.

They watched The London Follies that evening, leaving Bill to keep an eye open for the supernova. It came in the middle of the second act.

“It’s beginning,” he said.

Amy led the charge out of the common room onto the bridge. Valya had turned the Salvator around so it was facing back toward Cygni, toward Earth, and they could see everything through the viewport.

Valya had Bill rerun the event from the beginning. A star appeared where none had been before, and within moments it became the brightest object in the sky.

“It’s a rare sight,” said Valya. “Whole generations live and die without seeing one of those.”

He went up front and took his turn at the viewport. It chilled him to realize how far from Baltimore he was at that moment. “It was like that for three nights,” he said.

She nodded. “Seventy-nine hours before it began to fade.”

“I seem to recall they sent a mission.”

“The Perth. That was the Long Mission.”

Eric nodded. “At that time, it was the farthest we’d been from home. And the record stood a lot of years.”

“Wasn’t there something about aliens?” asked MacAllister.

“There was a theory,” said Eric, “that the supernova would attract anyone who could see it and who had an FTL capability. Just as it had drawn the Perth. So when they got to the system, they watched for a few weeks. Before they started back, they inserted a couple of monitors to say hello in case anyone showed up.”

“But nobody ever did,” said MacAllister.

Valya grinned. “Give it time. It’s early yet.”

“It’s been thirteen hundred years since the event. I suspect if anybody intended to go, they’d have been there by now.”

“But it’s only nineteen years since we left the satellites. There might have been visitors long before we got there. And most of the galaxy hasn’t seen the light yet. Doesn’t even know about the event.”

AMY HAD HEARD her father describe the night it had happened, how he and her mother had been on a flight somewhere, and they’d thought a meteor had exploded overhead. He’d told her how the sky had filled with light, and they’d all held their breath until the pilot got on the comm system and told them there was nothing wrong with the aircraft, that they were looking at some sort of astronomical phenomenon. “He didn’t have a clue what it was, any more than we did,” her father had explained. She’d heard him tell the story a hundred times. But until tonight she hadn’t really understood.

Her father still believed that she was destined for a life like his. Maybe put in some years as a prosecutor somewhere. Eventually go into politics. Her fascination with the cosmos was a phase, a childish inclination that would go away with the onset of adulthood, of maturity. She loved him, and she wished he could see the world as she did. But she’d make him proud, in time.

She thought how, one day, ten light-years closer to the galactic center, she’d park another ship in front of the wave and show her passengers this same supernova. In a way, it suggested that the future Amy Taylor already existed.

Bill broke into her thoughts: “On average, the Milky Way experiences two supernovas per century.”

“Were there any living worlds out there?” she asked. “Where the star exploded?”

“We don’t know,” said Bill. “The system was so thoroughly wrecked it was impossible to be sure.”

“I can’t imagine what it would be like,” she said, “to be in a place like that.”

“Where the sun was going to explode?” MacAllister shook his head. “It would raise hell with real estate values.”

Eric had seen so many reports of sterile systems that it had never really occurred to him there might have been anyone out there.

“What about our sun?” MacAllister asked. “It’s stable, right?”

Valya smiled at him. Amy thought the pilot liked him, although she never said anything. It was obvious that Valentina wanted to tell him no, the sun could blow up at any time, and you want to sink the space program. She could never bring herself to forget MacAllister’s opposition to the Academy. You could see it in the attitude of the two toward each other. It was a pity. They’d have made an interesting couple, though they were both kind of old. “It’s fine,” Valya said. “Good for a few billion years yet.”

“How many?” asked Amy, trying to sound worried.

“A few billion.”

“That’s a relief,” she said, wondering if anyone there had heard the old joke. “For a minute I thought you said million.”

MacAllister laughed and went on: “Just for argument, if the sun were going to go supernova, we’d know about it, right? Well in advance?”

Valya passed the question to Bill. “As I understand it,” he said, “the sun’s not sufficiently massive to go supernova. And I don’t think it can go nova either. But I’m not sure.”