“He can’t do that.”

“I know that. So does he. It drives him crazy. He thinks the Academy mission’ll be here in a few months, and they’ll take Safe Harbor away from him. This whole thing will become somebody else’s game.”

The wine looked cool and inviting. “None of us really gets what we want,” she said. “He’s lucky. You all are. You came out here and struck a mother lode. A place where there was actually a civilization. Where there are ruins. This only happens every twenty years or so.” She lifted the glass and tasted the wine. It slid down her throat and warmed her. “No, nobody’ll take this away. The books will remember you and George and the Condor. The follow-up mission”—she shrugged—“they’ll come out and do their work, but this place will always belong to the Contact Society.”

He was quiet for a time. She liked Nick. He was one of those rare people whose presence made her feel warm and comfortable. “Tell me how a funeral director,” she said suddenly, “got interested in extraterrestrials.”

His expression changed, lightened. “Just like anybody else. When I was a boy, I had too much imagination. Something in the water, I guess.” He looked at the wine, tasted it, decided it was good. “I never really got away from it. But as I got older my perspective changed.”

“In what way?”

“I think much the way George does. There are some questions I’d like answered.”

“For example?”

“‘Is there a creator?’”

“You expect to find an answer out here?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t understand.”

“‘Is there a purpose to being alive?’ ‘Is there a point to it all?’” His gray eyes found hers.

Bill’s lamp came on. He had something for her. Not an emergency, though, or he’d simply have broken in.

“My profession is peculiar. We render a service people can’t do without. But we’re never taken seriously, except by mourners. People think of us as caricatures. Figures of fun.”

Hutch recalled her own amusement when she’d first learned of Nick’s profession.

“That’s why I’m still fascinated by ETs.” He leaned forward, his voice suddenly intense. “I have a talent for talking with people in times of stress. Everybody in my business does. You don’t survive without it. Survivors have a hard time at the end. I’m good at helping. At being there when a widow or a parent really needs somebody.” His eyes softened. “I’d love to be able to tell people that it’s really okay. That there’s a caretaker.”

“They hear that anyway.”

“Not from me.” He finished the wine and put the cup down. “I’d like to think it’s true.”

She looked at him.

“You’re right. I won’t find the answer out here. But for whatever reason, the question seems more real. Life at home is superficial. Here, we’re down to basics. If there’s an Almighty, this is where He hangs out. I can almost feel His presence.”

“Good luck,” she said.

“I know. George thinks we might eventually find an elder race. Somebody we can put the question to. Somebody who’s figured it out.”

“They won’t know either.”

“Probably not,” he said. “But there’s a chance. And that chance is why we came.”

She reached over, touching his wrist with her fingertips. He smiled sadly.

They needed a distraction so she switched over to Bill. “Am I interrupting?”

“No, Bill.” She sighed. “What do you have?”

“Transmission from Outpost.”

“Let’s see it.”

It was Jerry Hooper again. “We’ve looked at all three stealths,” he said. “They’re identical units.” He looked puzzled. “The first one you found is a hundred years old. More or less.” His eyebrows went up and the tip of his tongue played at the corners of his lips. “The others, the third one and the one Preach took on board, they go back more than twenty centuries.”

“Before the war,” Nick said.

It was as if the warm place they’d created on the bridge had turned official again. They were over the night side, and Hutch could see nothing of the ground below save the glowing haze of atmosphere along the rim of the world.

“Is that possible?” he asked.

“HUTCH.”

She rolled over and looked at the clock. A quarter after three. “Captain Park is on the circuit. He says it’s important.”

“Put him on,” she said. Bill understood that it would be audio only out of her bedroom.

Park looked sheepish. “I hate to bother you at this hour. We’re getting ready to pull out.” She had known, and they’d already said their good-byes. “But something happened. I don’t know whether it means anything or not. But I thought you should know right away. Just in case.”

If he wasn’t sure that it was important, it wasn’t important. “What is it, Ed?” she asked, letting her tone signal her irritation.

“The stealth you looked at.”

“Yes? What about it? Is it keeping an eye on you again?”

“No. But it’s transmitting.”

“Transmitting?” There was something ineffably sad about that. After all these years, the thing was still functioning. Signal to nowhere. “Thanks, Ed.”

He was shaking his head. “I’ve fed everything we have to Bill. See you next time.”

She sank back into the pillow, briefly considered waking George, not because she thought there was any rational need to do so, but simply because someone had awakened her.

She posted a transcript of the conversation and left it for him to look at over his breakfast.

THEY WERE IN the middle of a heated conversation when she walked into the dining room. “That’s not it at all,” Pete was saying. “The signal’s not being sent to the ground.”

A smile spread beatifically across George’s features. “What’s the difference? They’re all dead, Peter.”

Pete touched a link, and Safe Harbor appeared. The orbit used by the stealths blinked on. Then a series of vectors reached out from the orbit, forming a second circle, which was almost circumpolar. “The signal’s being directed along this route. The receiver’s in orbit, too, along there somewhere, but we don’t know its altitude, so we can’t determine precisely where it is.”

Tor leaned over. “They’re talking about the incoming signal, Hutch. The one from 1107.”

Pete took a bite out of a piece of toast and glanced up at her. “I asked Bill to look for the receiver but he says he can’t see anything.”

“Another stealth?” suggested George.

Nick had finished a plate of bacon and eggs, and was sitting contentedly drinking coffee. “What it suggests to me,” he said, “is a relay.”

“Well, of course it’s a relay,” said Herman. “So why do we care?”

“We aren’t talking about a relay to a local receiver,” said George. “We’re talking about another set of stealths, which in turn are relaying the signal somewhere else.”

That caught Hutch’s attention.

Alyx was chewing on a croissant. She stopped and looked around at her colleagues. “So what we’re saying is the locals didn’t put them up, right? Somebody dropped them off and kept going?”

Hutch had suspected the dating results, putting the age of one unit at about a century, had simply been in error. Now she saw what should have been obvious. “Somebody had a front-row seat for the war,” she said.

THEY FOLLOWED THE transmission and, within an hour, had located a new stealth. At Hutch’s suggestion, they searched along its orbit and found two more, placed equidistantly. Another planet-sized dish antenna, just like the one at 1107.

And Bill reported almost immediately that it was transmitting. “Outbound,” he added.

“Bill, is the direction of the signal perpendicular to the plane of the orbit?”

“Yes.”

Alyx and Tor were with her on the bridge when that answer came back. Alyx made a fist and pumped it up and down. It was another interstellar transmission.