That night, when the signal hadn’t come back, and the networks had shown the pictures of the shattered Happy Times, he’d known the Locarno was dead. Jon Silvestri and the rest of the Foundation crowd had tried to put the best face on things, saying they’d take a look at the situation in the morning, that maybe they could find the problem. But he knew they wouldn’t, and it weighed on him, as if he were personally involved. Defeat was in their voices, in their eyes. “They’re not going to try again,” he told Reyna.

“How do you know, Matt?”

They’d looked beaten. Maybe they had figured out why the Locarno hadn’t worked; maybe they’d known all along it wasn’t going anywhere. It might have been nothing more from the start than a gamble. A toss of the dice. And they’d lost.

He’d been in no mood to go back to his lonely apartment. So when she’d invited him up, he’d gone, and they sat on her sofa drinking dark wine and watching the aftermath, watching the commentators tell each other it was just as well. “The Interstellar Age,” said one of the guest experts, “is over. It’s time we accepted that.”

Later, while Reyna lay asleep beside him, his mind wandered. Where had the Golden Age gone? Twenty-five years ago, when he was just coming to adolescence, people had predicted that everyone who wanted to move off-world would, by the middle of the century, be able to do so. There was talk of establishing colonies at Quraqua and Masterman’s and Didion III. But there’d been complications, objections to killing off the local biology, long-range health issues, the question of who would pay for a massive transfer of people and supporting equipment. The world was crowded, but moving people elsewhere would never be an answer. People reproduced far more quickly than they could be moved around in ships.

One day, maybe, a human presence would extend through the Orion Arm. Maybe people would even fill the galaxy. But it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

He listened to the sounds of passing traffic. Somewhere in the building, there were voices. An argument.

“It’s the Gorley’s, Matt.”

“I thought you were asleep.”

Her legs touched his. But she held him at a distance. “They’re always fighting.”

“Sounds ugly.”

“He’s told me not to get married.”

“Really?”

“Ever.”

The argument was getting louder.

“You don’t have to say anything, Matt.” She pressed her lips close to his ear. “I know this isn’t going anywhere. But I want you to know it has been a special time for me.”

“I’m sorry, Reyna,” he said.

“I know. You wish you loved me.” She looked glorious in the light from the streetlamps filtering through the windows. “It’s just as well. Nobody gets hurt this way.”

They didn’t stop what they were doing. She didn’t get up and walk off. Didn’t go into a sulk. But the passion had gone out of the evening, and everything was mechanical after that. She told him it was okay, she understood. He waited for her to say she had to move on. But she didn’t. She simply clung to him.

He’d never understand women.

MATT SPENT THE morning showing clients around. They were looking at commercial properties, land that could be rezoned for malls and bars if the right buttons were pushed. He took one of them to lunch and did more escort work in the afternoon. When he finally got back to the office, everyone had left except Emma and the financial tech.

She poked her head in, asked how things had gone, and expressed herself satisfied with the results. In fact it had been a good day. No sales had been confirmed, but two big ones were on the cusp. And one they’d thought would back out was hanging in. But he still had a cloud over his head and wasn’t sure whether it was Reyna or the Happy Times debacle. Moreover, he couldn’t understand why the Happy Times problem really mattered to him.

He kept telling himself it had been a good day. But he felt no sense of exhilaration. In fact, he rarely did. He was capable of feeling good. But exhilarated? That was a thing of the past. That was a woman who took his breath away. Or maybe gliding through a system of moons and rings and spectral lighting. Over the years, after a successful day, he’d gone out with Emma and the others to celebrate. They’d headed out for Christy’s and toasted each other the way the researchers had when they discovered living cells on a remote world. But he’d just never felt very much.

“Headed home,” she said. “We have tickets tonight for Group Sex.” The show, of course. It was a live musical at the Carpathian. “By the way, you been near the news today? They’ve apparently given up on the new star drive.”

“Why?” he asked. “Did they say?”

“I guess because everybody says it won’t work.” She said good night and, minutes later, was gone. Matt put on the news, directed the AI to find the Locarno stories, and poured himself a coffee.

SILVESTRI INSISTS LOCARNO IS VALID, said the Capital Express.

The Post headlined: LOCARNO CRASHES.

The London Times said: STAR DRIVE FIASCO.

Commentary was similar: DEEP-SPACE SYSTEM SHOULD BE DUMPED.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

He found an interview with a Prometheus spokesman. The guy was small and washed-out and tired-looking. But he claimed the Foundation hadn’t made up its mind yet. “We’re still looking at our options.”

Would the Foundation risk its remaining ship in another test? “Anything’s possible.”

The spokesman could say what he wanted, but it was easy enough to read the signals. Unless someone intervened, the Locarno was dead.

Two people, one of each sex, discussed the drive itself on The Agenda. They were both identified as physicists, and they claimed to have gone over the theory. Both found it defective. It looks good on the surface, the woman said, but it doesn’t take into account the Magruder Effect. She was unable to explain the Magruder Effect in terms lucid enough for Matt. Her colleague agreed, adding that Silvestri had also not allowed sufficient flexibility for the required level of interdimensional connectivity. “You’d be able to get a vehicle out to Pluto,” he said, “but you wouldn’t recognize it once it arrived.”

“How do you mean?” asked the interviewer.

“It would be bent out of shape by hypertronic forces. That’s what happened to the Happy Times.”

“Jenny.” Matt was speaking to the AI. “Get me what you can on Jonathan Silvestri. On his scientific reputation.”

“One moment,” she said. Then: “Where would you like to start?”

THE ONLY WORKING physicist Matt knew was Troy Sully, to whom he’d sold a villa outside Alexandria two years earlier. Sully worked for Prescott Industries, which manufactured a wide range of electronic equipment. He’d come to the NAU from northern France, expecting to remain only a year, but had instead found his soul mate—his expression, not Matt’s—and elected to stay.

“There’s no way to know, Matt,” Troy told him over the circuit. “Let me advise you first it’s not my field.”

“Okay.”

“You get into some of this highly theoretical stuff, and you have to do as Silvestri says: Run the tests. Until you do that, you just don’t know.”

“But if almost every physicist on the planet says it can’t happen, which appears to be the case, doesn’t that carry some weight?”

“Sure.” Troy was a big, rangy guy. He looked more like a cowboy than a researcher. Except for the French accent. “But you have to keep in mind that what people say for the record isn’t necessarily what they really think. When physicists are asked to comment, officially, they tend to be very conservative. Nothing new will work. That is the safe position. One does not wish to be branded an unskeptical dreamer. If it should turn out that this Silvestri’s notions were in fact to prove correct, you would hear every physicist within range of a microphone explaining that he thought there was a chance it would happen because of so-and-so. You understand?”