Now she was delighted and relieved not to be the one in charge.

The director sat behind her desk, her aged eyes sweeping the room as she displayed a smile which Zafirah found enormously reassuring. “The good news is this: We were a self-sufficient colony before the accident. And self-sufficient we will remain.”

McNolan shook his head. “This far from a star? Our solar arrays aren’t going to get too much business way out here.”

“That might not matter,” Zafirah said, chiming in almost [83] before she realized it. When she noticed that everyone in the room had turned to look in her direction, she nearly lost her train of thought, then swiftly recovered. “I mean I think we can generate considerable power from what’s left of our warp generators. Probably not enough to create a warp field capable of getting us back home. But the output certainly ought to make up for our lack of nearby solar power.” Her gaze lit upon Avram Baruch. “What do you think, Avi?”

Baruch’s smile was wan and unconvincing. “Maybe. If nothing else fails. I’ve already examined the generators up close, and they’re a real mess. Three of them overloaded, and four others are melted to slag.”

“What about the nuclear reactor?” Mizuki asked.

“The autosafety programs kicked in during the accident and jettisoned it,” McNolan said. “They would’ve done the same to the warp generators, too, if the computers hadn’t glitched somewhere.”

“I think we can get by with what’s left of the warp generators,” Zafirah said, trying to sound hopeful. “Antimatter containment is still positive.”

Baruch scowled. “If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, Zaf. And even if the antimatter storage fields don’t go south, it could still be a real trick coaxing everything we need out of the remaining generators without blowing ourselves out of the sky again.”

“Well, we can’t afford to go too easy on the throttle,” said Claudia Hakidonmuya, Vanguard’s head geneticist. “We’ll need to convert a good deal of that power into the equivalent of sunlight. That is, if we want the hydroponics units to keep feeding everybody on board.”

The director smiled again. “As I said,” she repeated, “we are self-sufficient. Or at least we canbe, if we’re very careful, and very clever.”

“Not to mention incredibly lucky,” Baruch said.

“We weren’t vaporized when the warp field collapsed,” [84] Zafirah said. She was beginning to tire of the Israeli’s relentless negativity. “That would seem to bode well for our continued survival.” Inshallah, she thought silently.

“Then I’ll consider that issue settled for the moment,” the director said, her confident smile never wavering. “Now we must look beyond mere matters of survival.”

That surprised Zafirah, even coming from Dr. Mizuki. What, other than the fate of one’s immortal soul in the next world, could take on a higher priority than the colony’s survival?

Baruch looked suspicious, his shaggy salt-and-pepper eyebrows raised. “What do you mean?”

“Earth is still choking on the ashes of the Third World War,” the director said, evidently unfazed by Baruch’s reaction. “We’ve just demonstrated that we can tap a power source that could pull the rest of humanity out of that morass. We can offer the world hope.”

“We’d have to learn to stabilize the warp field,” McNolan said, “before we’d be able to offer anyone anything.”

The director nodded. “If we’d thought that was an impossibility, we never would have undertaken the experiment in the first place.”

“We’d also have to tell somebody on Earth about it,” McNolan countered. “And that we survived in the first place.”

“There are two tiny things wrong with that,” said Baruch. “One, a radio signal will take two centuries just to reach Earth. And two, all the external radio dishes were sheared off during the accident.”

Sheared off,Zafirah thought, wincing slightly. Along with Lidia.

Mizuki rose from behind her desk, signaling that the meeting was coming to a conclusion. She appeared undaunted by the difficulties that lay ahead. “Then the sooner we get started, the better. How soon can we get one of the radio transmitters operating?”

Monday, 2 September 2058

[85] At first, Zafirah thought the blip on the telescope’s viewer was a comet. But as it approached in a long, leisurely ellipse, she realized that the object possessed one particular feature that she’d never seen before on a comet.

It has running lights.

Less than an hour later, the viewers in the main control room displayed the spindle-shaped object—now clearly a sophisticated spacecraft of nonhuman origin—making a close approach to the asteroid’s exterior, and extending mooring grapnels to secure itself to the surface.

Holding herself even more erect than usual, Director Mizuki stood in the room’s center and addressed everyone present. “We obviously have a first contact situation here, people,” she said, smoothing a wrinkle on the front of her dark blue jumpsuit.

The human race’s veryfirst first contact situation,Zafirah thought, trying and failing to prevent her hands from trembling. She wasn’t certain whether fear or joy was the cause.

All she knew was that she could see no trace of fear or hesitation in the director’s eyes.

“Let’s go and greet them, Zafirah,” Mizuki said. Turning toward Hakidonmuya and McNolan, she added, “I’d also like Claudia and Kerwin to join the welcoming committee.”

The Hopi geneticist crossed to the director immediately. Zafirah, feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the moment, walked over to Mizuki a few seconds later.

But hard-eyed McNolan, seated at a console beside the apprehensive-looking Baruch, didn’t move.

Mizuki frowned. “You have objections?”

Baruch spoke up when McNolan hesitated. “In a word ... yes.”

“Fear is what plunged mankind back into the Stone [86] Age,” the director said, extending her arms as if to embrace the entire universe. “We ought not repeat that mistake out here.”

McNolan finally broke his silence. “Why haven’t they hailed us?”

“They may have been sending us friendship messages for the past hour,” Mizuki pointed out, referring to the balky high-gain antennas which remained in disrepair. During the past several weeks, simple survival had taken precedence over trying to send messages that Earth couldn’t possibly receive for a score of decades. “We have no way of being sure.”

“That’s precisely my point,” McNolan said. “Their intentions are a mystery.”

“Any civilization capable of traversing interstellar space has to be peaceful by definition,” said the director, adopting the didactic classroom-lecturer tone she preferred over confrontation.

“Assuming that they think in a way we can even understand,” Baruch said, casting a glance toward Zafirah. “Remember, most human cultures have always had a hell of a time understanding how otherhuman cultures think. Never mind aliens.”

Baruch’s glance reminded Zafirah of frightened young Israeli soldiers with quivering trigger fingers. And her own desperate, demoralized cousins who had for decades counterattacked indiscriminately by strapping bombs to their bodies. Justifiable fear had motivated both sides. Those recollections made her wonder whether Baruch and McNolan might not be equally justified in their wariness.

“And that’s what’s kept our species trapped on Earth for so long,” Hakidonmuya told Baruch. She gestured toward the image of the just-landed alien vessel. “Less enlightened beings are almost certain to destroy themselves before they figure out how to handle the energy sources interstellar travel requires.”

[87] The director walked toward the door, followed by Hakidonmuya. Zafirah fell into step behind the geneticist.

“Are you coming, Kerwin?” Mizuki said, pausing in the open hatchway.