On her last full day she went to the Margaret Ingersoll School, named for the first president of the North American Union, and talked to an auditorium full of teenagers about star flight. They were an enthusiastic audience. Hutch described how it felt to go into close orbit around a gas giant, or to step onto a world, an entire world, bigger than the Earth, on which nothing had ever lived. She flashed images of rings and moons and nebulas and listened delightedly to their reactions. And she saved the black hole for last.

“The long string of lights,” she explained, “the diamond necklace effect, is a star that’s been torn up and is going down the gullet.”

They looked at the luminous halo that surrounded the hole, at the black center, at the star-fragments. “Where does it go?” asked a girl in the rear of the auditorium.

“We don’t know whether it goes anywhere,” she said. “But some people think it’s a doorway to another universe.”

“What do you think?” asked a boy.

“Don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it lets out somewhere,” and she lowered her voice, “into a world where teens spend their spare time doing geometry.”

Afterward, on her way out, an eighteen-year-old boy asked whether she might be free that evening.

As it happened, she had planned a double date with her mother.

TERESA’S ESCORT WAS one of the actors from the show, polished and good-looking and charming. He’d played the role of Maritain, the bumbling political fanatic.

Her own date was a close friend, the celebrated Gregory MacAllister, with whom she’d shared the traumatic experience on Deepsix. MacAllister had been guest-lecturing at Princeton when she contacted him to say hello. One thing had led to another, and he’d come up for the evening.

They got back after midnight. Teresa was delighted with Mac, and seemed to think Hutch had been hiding something from her. “Believe me, Mom,” Hutch said, “he’s an interesting guy, but you wouldn’t want him underfoot. He was on his best behavior tonight.”

The remark left her puzzled but did not dash her hopes.

While they hung up their jackets, Hutch noticed that the commlink was blinking. “What have you got, Janet?” she asked the system.

“Matthew Brawley called, Priscilla. Twice.”

She caught her breath. And when Teresa asked whimsically who Matthew Brawley was, she knew that her mother had seen the reaction.

“Just a friend,” she said.

Teresa nodded and almost restrained a smile. “I’ll make coffee,” she said, and left.

Hutch wondered whether she wanted to take the message in her bedroom, but decided against an action that would only rouse her mother’s curiosity and invite further inquiry. “What have you got, Janet?” she asked.

“The first call was at 7:15. He left a number and asked that you call back.”

“And the second?”

“I’ll put it on-screen.”

The opposite wall faded to black, and Preach materialized. He wore floppy black gym pants and a bilious green pullover shirt open at the neck. He was leaning against something, a tabletop maybe, but the object hadn’t been scanned, and so he stood in front of her at an impossible angle, defying gravity. “Hi, Hutch,” he said. “I was looking forward to our night out, but Virgil’s anxious to get the program up and running. I’m headed to Atlanta tonight, and up to the Wheel tomorrow. By Friday we’ll be on our way.

“I guess that puts us off until spring. But I have you on my calendar and I’m holding you to it.

“Have a good flight out to 3011, or whatever it is. I’ll be nearby. Say hello when you get time.”

He smiled, and blinked off.

She stood looking at the screen.

Damn.

GEORGE HOCKELMANN GOT off to an unpromising start in life. He was the son of unambitious Memphis suburbanites who were content to lounge their way through the years, sipping cold beer and watching themselves performing heroically or romantically in simulated adventures in distant places and more rousing times. George had been a clumsy kid, both physically and socially. He didn’t engage in athletics, didn’t make friends easily, and in later life, he came to suspect he’d spent the better part of his first fifteen years sitting in his room building models of starships.

His classes didn’t go well either. He must have had a vacuous stare or something because his teachers didn’t expect much from him, and consequently he didn’t produce much. That was probably just as well, because he was already an inviting target for bullies.

But he survived, often with the help of Herman Culp, a tough little kid from Hurst Avenue. Although most of his grades remained indifferent, he discovered a talent for math that translated itself, by the time he was twenty-three, into a sheer genius for predicting financial trends. At twenty-four, he launched The Main Street Observer, an investment newsletter that became so successful that he was twice investigated by the SXC on suspicion of manipulation.

By twenty-six, he’d joined Nussbaum’s Golden Hundred, the richest entrepreneurs in the North American Union. Six years later, he concluded he’d earned all the money he could possibly spend, he had no real interest in wielding influence, and so he began to look for something else to do with his life.

He bought the Memphis Rebels of the United League and set out to bring a world championship to his hometown. It never quite happened, and now, more than two decades later, he regarded it as his single serious failure.

He’d remained close to Herman. They went hunting each year in the fall, usually in Manitoba. But there’d been a year when Herman had been offered the use of a cousin’s lodge. It was north of Montreal along the St. Maurice River, picturesque country, loaded with moose and deer. The lodge was situated near Dolbeau, a legendary spot where a UFO was supposed to have set down almost a half century earlier. They’d wandered around town, visited its museum, talked to the inhabitants, gone out to the place where everybody said it actually landed. They’d looked at broken trees and scorched rock, the graves of three unfortunate hunters who had, with their dogs, apparently stumbled onto the visitors. (Little had been found of the hunters other than charred smears, said the townspeople. So George had wondered what was buried, but he didn’t pursue the issue.)

Had it really happened?

The locals swore it had.

Pieces of evidence had been found at the scene, but the army had arrived, collected everything, and then denied everything.

George understood that it was to the benefit of the citizens of Dolbeau to keep the story alive. The town had become a major tourist center. There were five motels, a museum, a theater dedicated to endless restagings of the event, souvenir shops, and a collection of restaurants serving sandwiches with names like the ET, the Coverup, the FTL, the Anti-Grav. All appeared to be prospering.

George was a skeptic both by training and by inclination. Yet there was something about the Dolbeau phenomenon that left him wanting to believe it had happened. He would remember for the rest of his life standing on the ridge overlooking the sacred spot, listening to the wind moving among the trees, and thinking, yes, it might have come in from over there, big and iron gray with lights blinking, and it would have set down there, mashing those trees. It was disk-shaped. You could still see the bowl formed in the vegetation, maybe thirty meters across.

And he believed. From that moment, his life changed. Not a small change, like the day you discover you like asparagus after all, or when you stop wearing white socks. This was life-altering stuff. This was casting off the religious beliefs of a lifetime and signing on for something new. Not that the UFO itself took him over, but in later years he’d realize it was the first time he had ever looked at the stars. Really looked at them, and seen the sky as a four-dimensional marvel rather than simply a canopy over his head.