The Engines Of God

26 On board NCK Catherine Perth. Friday, April 15; 0515 hours

The chime brought Carson out of an uneasy sleep.

He let in an ecstatic Hutch. "I think I've got it," she said, waving a lightpad.

"Got what?"

She threw herself into a chair. "If we go to the right place," she said, "and make an Oz, we can find out what this is all about."

"Make an Oz? Are you serious? We can't make an Oz." He wondered how much she'd had to drink during the night. "Have you been to bed at all?" he asked accusingly.

"Forget bed," she said. "The numbers work."

Carson put on coffee. "Slow down. What numbers? And where's the right place!"

She picked up a remote, and put a star chart on his display. She drew a line along the edge of the Void, and parallel lines through Beta Pac, Quraqua, and Nok. "We always knew we had the eight-thousand-year cycles. But we didn't see any other pattern. Maybe because it was staring us in the face.

"We think we know of two events on Nok, and two on Quraqua. And we may have seen evidence of at least one here."

"Okay," said Carson. "Where does that leave us?"

"If there really is an eight-thousand-year cycle, and we know there was an event here somewhere around 5000 B.C., then there must have been an earlier event somewhere around 13,000 B.C. Right? And at 21,000 B.C." She posted the numbers in a window:

Event Beta Pac Quraqua Nok

1 21,000BC ______ ______

2 13,000 BC ______ ______

3 5000 BC ______ ______

"If we stay with the eight-thousand-year cycle," she said, "and we push it backward in time, then there would have been an event on Quraqua at about 17,000 B.C. Yes?"

Event Beta Pac Quraqua Nok

1 21,000BC 17,000 BC ______

2 13,000BC 9000 BC ______

3 5OOOBC 1000BC _____

"Okay."

"Good. We're sure of the second and third Quraqua events. In both cases, they start four thousand years later. What does that suggest?"

"Damned if I know."

"Frank, the same kind of thing happens on Nok."

"In what way?"

She filled in the last column, rounding the numbers off.

Event Beta Pac Quraqua Nok

1 21,000BC 17,000 BC 16,000BC

2 13,000 BC 9000 BC 8000 BC

3 5000 BC 1000 BC ______0

"This time," Carson said, "there's always a thousand-year difference. I see the pattern, but I don't see the point."

"It's a wave, Frank. Whatever this thing is, it's coming in from the Void. It travels one light-year every seventy-four years. The first one we know about, the A wave, arrived here, at Beta Pac, somewhere around 21,000 B.C."

"I'll be damned," he said.

"Four thousand years later, it hits Quraqua. Then, a thousand or so after that, it shows up at Nok."

Carson thought it over. It sounded like pure imagination. But the numbers worked. "What could it be?"

"The Dawn Treader," she said.

"What?"

Her eyes narrowed. "Remember the Quraquat prayer?" She put it on the screen:

In the streets of Hau-kai, we wait. Night comes, winter descends, The lights of the world grow cold. And, in this three-hundredth year From the ascendancy of Bilat, He will come who treads the dawn, Tramples the sun beneath his feet, And judges the souls of men. He will stride across the rooftops, And he will fire the engines of God.

"Whatever it is," she said, "it's connected somehow with the Oz structures."

The room felt cold. "Could they be talismans?" Carson asked. But the prospect of an advanced race resorting to attempts to invoke the supernatural was disquieting.

"Or targets," said Hutch. "Ritual sacrifices? Symbolic offerings to the gods?" She swung around to face him. "Look, if any of this is right, the wave that went through Nok during A.D. 400 has traveled about thirty-five light years since." She drew another parallel line to mark its location. "There's a star system located along this track. I think we should go take a look."

Carson called Truscott early. "I need a favor," he said. "I'd like to borrow some equipment."

She was in her quarters. "What do you need, Frank?" "A heavy-duty particle beam projector. Biggest you have. You do have one on board, right?"

"Yes, we have several." She looked perplexed. "You're not going excavating down there?"

"No," Carson said. "Nothing like that. In fact, we're leaving the system."

She registered surprise. "I can arrange it. What else?" "A pod. Something big enough to use as a command post." "Okay," she said. "We can do that, too. You'll have to sign for this stuff."

"Thanks. I owe you, Melanie."

"I agree. Now, how about telling me what this is all about?" He could see no reason for secrecy. "Sure," he said. "How about breakfast?"

The Ashley Tee was essentially a group of four cylinders revolving around a central axis. It bristled with sensing and communication devices. Hutch had already talked to them before they made the transfer. "We've got a celebrity," she said, with a smile.

The celebrity was its pilot, the near-legendary Angela Morgan.

Angela was tall and trim with silver hair and gray eyes. Hutch had never met her, but she knew about her. Angela had performed many of the pioneer flights during the early days, had pushed the limits of mag technology, and had been the driving force behind many of the safety features now incorporated in FTL deployment.

Her partner was Terry Drafts, a young African physicist not half her age. He was soft-spoken, introspective, intense. He made no secret of his view that riding with Angela was equivalent to getting his ticket punched for greater things.

"If you've really got something, Carson," Angela said, "we'd be happy to help. Wouldn't we, Terry? But don't waste our time, okay?"

Since all starships maintain onboard clocks in correlation with Greenwich, the new passengers suffered no temporal dislocation. It was mid-morning on all the vessels of the various fleets when Angela showed her new passengers to their quarters.

She joined them for lunch, and listened while they talked about their experiences in the system. Eventually, she asked pointedly whether they were certain this was the home world of the Monument-Makers. (They were.) How had the team members been lost? (No one got into graphic details, but they told her enough to elicit both her disapproval and her respect.)

"I see why they wanted me to put the ship at your disposal," she said. "We can stay here. We can take you to Point Zebra. Or we can go all the way back to Earth. Your call." The Point was the staging site for local survey vessels.

"Angela," said Carson, "what we'd like is to take a look at one of the moons in this system. Then we're going to do some serious traveling."

Angela trained the ship's telescopes on the harbor city. It looked serene: white ruins embedded in soft green hills, thick forest spilling into the sea. The broken bridge that led nowhere.

They spent two days at the Oz-like artifact. They marveled anew at its perpendicularity. It was, announced Drafts, the mecca of right angles. And, unlike the construct on Quraqua's moon, this one had no exception, no round tower.

But it too was damaged. Charred. Cratered.

"I've seen the other one," said Angela. "Why would they make something like this?"

"That's what we hope to find out," said Carson.

That evening, Monday, April 18, 2203, at slightly before 1100 hours, they rolled out of lunar orbit.

Two nights later, Carson ceremonially stored his wheel-chair. And Janet added another piece of speculation. She first mentioned it to Hutch. "I was thinking," she said, "about the phrase in that Quraquat prayer—"

" 'The engines of God'?»

"Yes. The engines of God—"

"What of it?"

"We might not be far off. // there's an A wave, the one that touched Beta Pac in 21,000 B.C.: if it kept going, it would have reached Earth."

Hutch nodded. "Before the rise of civilization, right? Before anybody was there to record it."

"Not exactly. It would have passed through the solar system somewhere around 5000 B.C."

Hutch waited. The date meant nothing to her.

Janet shrugged. "It fits the most recent estimates for Sodom and Gomorrah."

ARCHIVE

(Transmitted via Laserbuoy)

TO: NCA GARY KNAPP ATT: DAVID EMORY

FROM: FRANK CARSON, BETA PAC MISSION

NCA ASHLEY TEE

SUBJECT: OPERATIONAL MOVEMENT DAVID. SORRY TO LEAVE BEFORE YOU GET HERE, BUT BUSINESS PRESSES. WE MAY BE ABLE TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENED AT ORIKON. NEXT STOP IS LCO4418. JOIN US THERE IF YOU CAN. CARSON.

27 On board NCA Ashley Tee, en route to LCO4418. Wednesday, April 27; 1930 hours

"I can't believe," said Drafts, frowning at his pair of deuces, "we're really doing this."

"Doing what?" asked Angela, looking up from a book.

"Chasing a dragon," said Hutch. She wasn't holding anything either.

"It's worth the trip," said Angela. "I don't believe a word of it. But I've been wrong before." She literally radiated vitality. Hutch had no trouble imagining her flying into a volcano.

"By me," said Drafts. He had been winning, and was in an ebullient mood. "The problem I have," he said, "is that I can't imagine what this thing might look like. I mean, are we expecting hordes of destructive nanomachines belched into the galaxy from somewhere in the Void every eight thousand years?" He placed his cards face down on the table. "Or fleets filled with psychopaths?"

"Maybe," said Janet, "it's not from the Void, but something out of the center of the galaxy." She was trying not to look pleased with her cards. "I'll open," she said. She pushed a coin into the pot. "It would come from the same direction."

Drafts glanced at Carson. "Forty-four eighteen's already been looked at. If there had been anything going on out there, we'd know about it."

"Maybe not," said Angela. "If this thing exists, it might not be easy to find unless you know what you're looking for."

"Well," said Drafts, still talking to Carson, "I don't want to offend anybody, but I doubt this dragon is likely to stand up to the light of day."

"Ah, Terry, will you never learn?" Angela delivered a sigh they could have heard in the shuttle bay. "You're right. But it's the wrongheaded types who make the big finds."

Carson smiled at her appreciatively.

Drafts shrugged. "Okay," he said.

Hutch folded, and watched Janet scare everyone out of the pot. Carson picked up the cards and began to shuffle. "The Monument-Maker as Death," he said. "Could they have built something that got away from them?"

Hutch tried to wave it away. "Why don't we wait until we get there? Meantime, we can't do anything except guess."

Angela was sitting with her feet doubled under her. She was reading Matama, the hundred-year-old Japanese tragedy. "If there is a wave," she said without looking up, "it would have to be pretty deep, on an order of a couple of light-years, for us to have a reasonable chance to locate it. What kind of mechanism could be that big?"

"If it exists," said Janet, "it stretches from Quraqua to Nok. That's a hundred light-years. At a minimum." She looked toward Carson. "That would have to be an effect beyond anybody's capability to manufacture."

"I just can't see that the evidence amounts to anything," said Drafts. "Look, these people, whoever they were, had a passion for leaving their signature everywhere they've been. They liked monuments. The Oz-structures and the cube moons were early efforts. They were getting their sea legs. No hidden meanings; just practice."

"Come on, Terry," said Carson.

"Why not? Why does there have to be some deep-seated significance? Maybe they're just what most other monuments are: somebody's idea of high art. And the eight-thousand-year cycle is hardly established as fact. Half of it's pure guess-work, and I bet the rest of it is going to turn out to be wishful thinking."

Carson and Janet looked at Hutch. Hell, she thought, I made no guarantees. But she felt forced to defend her speculations. "The dating wasn't mine," she said. "It was done by Henry Jacobi and David Emory and the data technicians on the Perth. I just put it together. If the numbers are a coincidence, they're a coincidence. But it's not wishful thinking. I have no interest in meeting a dragon out here."

The tension broke, and they all laughed.

If a cosmic hand were to move the red giant LCO4418 to the center of the solar system, Mercury and Venus would sink beneath its tides, and Earth would swim through its upper atmosphere. The surface simmered serenely at less than 2200 degrees Kelvin. It was an ancient star, far older than Sol. Its blood-colored light spilled across its family of worlds.

Terrestrial planets orbited at either end of the system, separated by four gas giants. The survey team which had visited the system ten years earlier had concluded that there had probably once been other planets, closer to the central luminary, but they had been absorbed as the sun expanded. LCO4418 was now thought to be close to the end of this phase of its cycle. Over the next several million years, it would recede.

Carson watched recordings of its image on the screens. Prominences did not erupt from its interior, nor did sunspots mar its placid surface. It had entered the final stage of its existence, and death would come quickly now. By cosmic standards.

For all that, it would still be here, and still look much the same, when the human race had long since met whatever fate awaited it. Or had evolved into something else.

The flight was somber. The festive mood and the enthusiasm of the days on the Winckelmann had gone. The crew and the passengers spent most of their time together. No one drifted off alone. But there were long silences and uncomfortable glances and things left unspoken. It was perhaps not entirely coincidental that on the evening before their arrival at LCO4418, the conversation had centered on how funerals might be improved to aid future archeologists.

Late in the afternoon of May 7, they jumped back into real space, well south of the planetary plain.

On those occasions when Carson was honest with himself, he knew that he did not expect to find anything. He did not really believe in the wave. It was an intriguing concept, but this was not a phenomenon that he could credit. So he stood on Ashley's bridge, and surveyed the vast wastes, and wondered, not for the first time, why he was here.

The three surviving members of the original team found they could no longer hide their feelings from each other, and Carson was not surprised when Hutch, who had come up behind him, moved right into his mood. "Sometimes," she said, "you just have to take your chance, and let go."

They started by performing a system-wide survey for artificial objects. It showed negative, which did not mean there might not be something present, but only that any such object would be at considerable range, or quite small, or hidden behind a natural body.

In spite of themselves—they agreed, when pressed, that they were chasing ghosts—they were disappointed.

Angela pored over the records of the original mission to 4418. "A fairly typical system," she told Hutch. "What do we do now?"

The red giant dominated the viewscreens. "Verticals and perpendiculars," she said. "We are going to make some right angles."

Carson had been looking for a good construction site. He explained his strategy in detail, and Angela produced topographical maps from the survey. They decided to use an oversized moon orbiting the second planet: 4418-IID. Delta.

Drafts put it on the display. In the dim glow of the sun, it was an exotic worldlet, silver and gold by candlelight. Clouds drifted above orange snowfields and nitrogen seas, methane swamps and crooked mountain chains. It lay in the shadow of the big planet's wispy rings.

The atmosphere read out as hydrogen, methane, nitrogen, with substantial amounts of ethane, hydrogen cyanide, ethyl-ene. Distance from the central world was 650,000 kilometers. Period of revolution: 13 days. Diameter: 5300 kilometers. Surface temperature: -165 °C, at the equator. Surface gravity:.37. Orbital period: 11.14 days. Age: estimated 4.7 billion years, with an error factor of ten percent. The system was twelve A.U.s from the sun.

They watched an ice volcano erupt in the southern hemisphere. Snow was falling over one of the oceans, and a nearby coastline was whipped by heavy rain. "The rainstorm might be two-hundred proof," said Angela. "There's a lot of ethanol down there, and the temperature's about right." She grinned. "I wouldn't be surprised to find gasoline lakes."

Carson found what he was looking for in the south, about 20 degrees below the equator: a vast plain cluttered with plateaus. "Here." He tapped the screen. "Here's where we want to set up."

With Hutch's help, Drafts disconnected three of the ship's external cameras. The Ashley Tee was consequently left with blind spots, but they could get by. They jury-rigged a mount for the laser, and tripods for the cameras.

"Tell me about the communications," Carson asked as they rounded the gas giant early in the afternoon of their third day. They would go into orbit around Delta at breakfast time.

Hutch set up one of the cameras for his inspection, opened the tripod (which they would anchor into the ice), and attached a sensor cluster. "We put the cameras on the ground, around the target. We'll launch two comsats. If the cameras see something, they'll transmit pictures to the comsats, which will send a hyperlight alarm to Point Zebra. The satellites are enclosed in convex casings. No right angles."

"What triggers the cameras?"

"A sudden and substantial increase in electrical activity, or in temperature beyond that normally encountered. Each camera has its own sensor system, and will operate independently. If something does happen, we should be able to get pictures."

"How about ordinary electrical storms? Won't they set it off?"

"Angela says lightning will be infrequent here, and quoted pretty good odds against normal phenomena triggering the sensors. If they do," she shrugged, "too bad. Somebody will come out for no reason."

"Somebody will come outT' This wasn't exactly the kind of alarm system Carson had in mind. "Won't they be able to tell when they get the pictures at the Point?"

"They won't get any pictures. The pictures are stored in the satellites. All that'll happen is an alarm will go off."

"Why not send the pictures?"

"Can't. Hyperspace communication requires a lot of power. We just can't generate enough for complex transmissions unless we plan to hang around ourselves and use Ashley's power plant. So we do the next best thing: we send a beep."

Fine, Carson thought. Every time there was an electrical storm, they would have to dispatch a ship. "I can't say I care much for this arrangement," he grumbled. "How safe will the cameras be if an event occurs?"

"Hard to say, since we really don't know what the event is. They have to be close to the target area, within a few hundred meters, for the short-range sensors to work. If we back it up farther, and go long-range, they'll pick up too much stray activity, and then we will get a series of false alarms."

"Okay."

"One other thing. If the kind of action we're looking for develops, there'll be a lot of electricity in the atmosphere, and the transmissions will get scrambled. In that case, the satellites will not get the pictures."

"So package in a delayed broadcast, too."

"I've done that. We will also record everything at ground level. Redundant copies everywhere. So if anything survives, we'll have a record." She was proud of her work, and had expected Carson to notice. But he still seemed preoccupied. "I've tried to shield the equipment as best I can," she continued.

"Okay," he said. "Good."

"You'll want to send someone out in a couple of years to replace this stuff. It's not designed for this kind of mission, so it won't last much beyond that."

"I know," he said. They both understood that such a backup flight would be unlikely.

They pinpointed a target area on a broad, snow-covered plain between a mountain range and a swamp filled with nitrogen and hydrocarbon sludge. The plateaus that had drawn Carson's attention were scattered across an otherwise flat landscape. It looked like a piece of the American West, covered with ice, and bathed in the pale red light of the distant sun.

They settled on a group of four mesas which lay within an area approximately sixty kilometers on a side. Each was already roughly rectangular. (The group had been chosen primarily for that reason.) The smallest comprised an area of about six square kilometers, the largest about a hundred. Carson would have given much to find four mesas at the corners of a square, but nature had not provided, not on this world, nor on any other in the system. He was as close as he could get.

They planned to polish off the rough edges, and convert the mesas into perfect rectangles. To that purpose, three would require only minor sculpting. The fourth, the largest, would need a major effort.

"They won't look much like Oz," said Terry.

"Sure they will," said Janet. "When we're finished with them, they'll be all straight lines. No curves. Like the cube moons."

"And you think it's the straight lines that matter?"

"Yes," she said. Right angles. It always comes back to right angles. "You know what? Maybe it's just a matter of creating a design that doesn't appear in nature. We were talking about doing some crosscuts. Making it fancy. But that might not matter."

Carson was uncomfortable that no one on board had experience using the big pulser. "We might end by shooting ourselves down," he said.

They installed the mount for the particle beam projector in the cargo area of the shuttle. Janet looked at it uncertainly and grinned at Hutch. "If the thing falls out," she said, "the show's over."

Hutch tried to visualize the way the operation would work. They would have to fly the shuttle at times almost on its side in order to get a good target angle out the cargo door. "I hope none of us falls out," she said.

They loaded the pod modules on board, and filled several spare air tanks. There'd be no opportunity to cycle air from this environment if things went wrong. For that reason, Carson, who was now thoroughly persuaded to play it safe, brought along enough for a month.

"Why so much?" asked Drafts.

"Shuttle might break down," Carson said. "We could get stuck there."

Hutch didn't like the shuttle. It was boxy, not very aerodynamic, not good for atmospheric flying. It would be a bumpy ride. And slow. And she was not entirely confident, despite what she had told Carson, of her ability to handle it. "I hate to tell you this," she said, "but this is a shoebox with wings. You'd be better off if you could get Angela to pilot the thing. She's used to it, and she's the best there is."

"It can't be that hard."

"You want to bet your life on it?"

Carson looked at her, and smiled his approval. "Thanks," he said.

He took Hutch with him to the bridge, where Angela was examining displays of the target area. "We'd like to have you fly the shuttle," he said without preliminary. "Hutch tells me it's likely to be difficult to handle, and she says you're pretty good."

Angela studied him for a long moment. "Is that what you want?" she asked Hutch. She wore a light brown ship's jacket, with Ashley's logo, a sail against a circle of stars, displayed prominently on the left breast.

"Yes. I think it would be a good idea."

"Then I'll do it." Hutch thought she looked as if she had something on her mind. "Of course the shuttle's cramped. And four people will crowd the ground station."

Janet leaned in. "I'm not all that excited about carving mountains. If you want, I'll help hold the fort here."

In the morning, the shuttle slipped its moorings, parted from the Ashley Tee, and began its descent. Angela had preset a glide path that allowed a methodical entry. They slipped easily into the upper air.

The delicate interaction between the shuttle's flux and local magnetic fields provided all the lift she needed. But as the air pressure rose, they began to bounce around. The wind thumped the panels and blew gobs of thick rain against the windows. Carson, tied into a temporary web in back, complained loudly.

"It's okay," said Angela. "With this kind of vehicle, you've always got a lot of headwind. Don't worry. It's pretty tough."

Mountain ranges and snow dunes and a coffee-colored sea rose to meet them. No human foot. Hutch thought. Ever.

An hour later, they approached the target area, coming in over a sludge-filled river. The landscape was mottled with snowdrifts and boulders and gullies. The light was a Halloween mixture from the red sun and the watery-brown ringed giant that floated on the horizon like a Chinese balloon. Gloomy, cold, and forbidding. Not a place to build a country estate.

Angela turned south. "Ten minutes," she said.

The plain smoothed out. The wind came up again, and the surface disappeared beneath blowing snow. The sky was red, not sunset red, but rather like the scorched appearance of clouds in the aftermath of a forest fire. The first plateaus appeared.

"They're down," said Drafts.

He'd been watching the pictures come in. Janet had shown some concern during the shuttle descent, and was visibly relieved that the mission was on the ground. "Looks like a rainstorm to the west," she said. Orange-gray clouds rode over a mustard-colored mist. "Maybe some of that two-hundred proof."

"Janet." Drafts swung to face her. "Tell me something?"

"Sure."

"What do you do with your spare time when you aren't chasing cosmic waves?"

A bank of displays on her right were dark. These were the long-range scanners, still looking for anything unusual in the system. The sun, the worlds and moons, comets and rocks and assorted debris had been blanked out. Anything else, anything else at all out of the ordinary, out to the edge of the system, would register.

Fool's errand. What else could you call it?

"I'm not sure anymore," she said. "I'm really not sure."

LOG

Ground team reports they have touched down. We have launched two comsats to ensure round-the-clock communication. We have also orbited a buoy to direct the ship from Nok when it arrives.

I will add that this is the most unusual mission in which I have participated. No one seems to know what we're looking for.

— T. F. Drafts NCA Ashley Tee May 14, 2203

28 LCO4418-I1D ("Delta"). Saturday, May 14; 1745 GMT

The ground blizzard hid the surface, burying everything except the taller mesas, which might have been a gray fleet moving across rust-colored seas. The four they had selected were on the westernmost border of the plain, where the ground began to turn mountainous.

Hutch thought that Carson was being influenced by the towers at the corners of the central square in the Oz-construct on Quraqua's moon. When she mentioned it to him, he seemed surprised, but then agreed that she was probably right. "I'd like to do the same thing here," he said. "Make a square by using squares. We're not quite able to do that, but we can get close."

The largest of the four plateaus merged its rear section with a mountain. This was the one which would present the most difficulty, and they therefore chose its summit as the site for their base. Angela had brought the shuttle down through a stiff wind, and laid it cautiously into the orange snow. Hutch was impressed.

This was a big plateau. They would have needed about ten hours to walk around its rim. Locked in the snow storm, they could not see its sizable dimensions, but they knew they had taken on an ambitious job.

"Let's sit tight for tonight," Carson said. "We'll set up in the morning."

Angela pointed toward a crimson smear in the east. "It is morning. But you're right: let's wait 'til the storm blows over. Then this whole project will look reasonable." She smiled drily.

Drafts put the technical manual down when Janet came up onto the bridge. "Anything happening?"

"It's quiet. I think they're all asleep."

"Do we have a reading on the weather?"

"It's bad. I think it's always bad. I'm not sure. My meteorology is weak."

The screens were active. They reflected power drain figures, short- and long-range scans, attitude, orbital configuration. Fuel levels. Life support on both the ship and the shuttle.

Janet was pleased with the way things had turned out. Drafts, despite his hostility to the project, was a congenial companion, armed with a droll sense of humor. The ship was comfortable, and life was easy up here. She couldn't see that the ground assignment was anything but cramped drudgery.

She was about to make some small talk, when he stiffened. Almost immediately, an alert beeped. "Long range," he said.

Two displays brightened. They presented optical and sensor views of a hazy object. Range at twelve A.U.s.

Drafts frowned. "Odd."

Projected diameter: 23,000 km.

"Irregular shape," said Janet.

"We seem to have an extra world." He called up survey records. "Not supposed to be there." He studied the sensor return. "We're not getting much penetration," he said. "It looks like a cloud. Hydrogen and dust. Trace iron, carbon, formaldehyde, and silicate particles."

"So it's a cloud." Janet didn't understand why he looked so puzzled.

"Angela would know more about this than I do, but I don't think clouds come this small. They tend to be a lot bigger."

"What's inside?" asked Janet.

"Don't know. We can't get into it."

He went to mag five and enhanced. It was still a blur.

Delta. Sunday, May 15; 1045 hours.

The winds quit as if a switch had been thrown. The top of the mesa became very still, and they looked out across a crumpled orange wasteland. Angela moved the shuttle out of the snow that had piled up around it, and they got out and began assembling their base.

Within two hours, they erected an RK/107 top-of-the-line pressurized shelter, which consisted of a triad of interfaced (but fully compartmented) silver and black domes. The snow was wet and heavy and resisted movement, and they were thoroughly tired by the time they collapsed into the unit's compress chairs. Meantime, another storm blew up, and they watched fiery clouds roll overhead. This time, though, it rained. It rained thick, syrupy drops that plopped and blatted against the windows and rolled down like amoebas. Lightning flickered.

Angela sat by a window. "So much for the rare electrical storm."

"By the way," said Carson, "if this is really a gasoline atmosphere, why don't the lightning bolts blow the place up?"

"No oxygen," she said. "If there were oxygen in the mix, we'd get a show."

The shelter was state-of-the-art. They had private apartments, a washroom, a kitchen, an operations center, and a conference room. Polarized windows were set in all outside walls. They had comfortable furniture, music, extensive data banks, decent food. "We could have done worse," said Angela, who, like the others, was accustomed to accommodations produced by the lowest bidder.

She seemed thoughtful. And when Hutch asked what was on her mind, she hesitated. "Not sure," she said. "I'm getting near retirement. In fact, they didn't want me to come out on this one. I think this is my swan song." Her gray eyes brightened. "This is the most interesting mission I've been on." Her gaze turned inward. "Yeah. I haven't seen anything like this before. I hope we find something so I can go out in style."

"Even a dragon?"

"Sure," she said. "Especially a dragon."

"It won't pass very close."

Janet had been idling through Ashley's mission report. The ship had been surveying older stars, mostly middle-aged, stable G-types, prime candidates in the twin searches for habitable worlds and other civilizations. So far, they had nothing to show for their efforts.

The auxiliary screen on her right displayed the cloud. Nothing much had changed. It was somewhat more distinct, a result of enhancement and, to a lesser degree, its decreased range.

"Hey." Drafts stared at his instruments. "I think we've got another one."

"Another what?"

"Another cloud."

Janet slid into the seat beside him. "Where?"

"Extreme long range." He jabbed a finger at the readout. She picked it up on a window. "This one is on the other side of the sun, moving away from us. It's out on the edge of the system."

"Can't we get a better picture?"

"It's too far." He was running a search through the data banks. "But it's also not on the charts." He turned toward her. "Neither of these objects was here when the original survey was made."

"Or they got missed."

"I would have thought that was unlikely. Maybe we better let Angela know."

They had just left the dome, just cycled through the airlock and stepped out into the snow, when Drafts's voice broke into their chatter. "We have a couple of anomalies," he said.

They kept walking, plowing through the snow with difficulty. Carson had begun to wonder whether they should try to make snowshoes. "What kind of anomalies?" he asked.

"Clouds, I think. Two of them."

"Here?" asked Angela, looking into a crystal-clear sky, apparently thinking what Carson thought: that they were talking about something in the atmosphere.

"One at twelve A.U.s, approaching; the other on the far side of the sun. Going the other way. Listen, I'm not sure yet, but I don't think they're in orbit."

"Clouds, you say?"

"Yeah. Clouds."

"Not possible," she said.

"We'll send you pictures."

"Okay. Yes, do that." She started back inside. "Frank, do you mind?"

"No. Go back and look. We'll see you in the shuttle."

The ATL1600 general-purpose particle beam projector was of the type that had been used to cut shafts in the polar ice packs on Quraqua. It was simple to operate, durable, and effective. The narrow, tightly-focused beam that it generated was capable, even while tied to the shuttle's limited power plant, of slicing the mesas like so much cheese.

On Quraqua, the projectors had been driven by a fusion link with the orbiter. Here, the drain on the shuttle would be considerable, and they could not approach full power. Operations would be limited to seven hours daily. The work would be slow, but they had plenty of time.

The real problem was that the unit was difficult to manage. It had been designed for installation on board a specially fitted CAT. Carson would have to try to aim it from the cargo hold, while the shuttle was in flight. Hutch's mount was really little more than a restraining web to prevent the instrument, or its operator, from falling out. They had one advantage: the half-ton unit weighed only about four hundred pounds in this gravity.

When Angela rejoined them, she was excited. "I don't know whether it has anything to do with what we're looking for, but we've got a couple of very strange beasties out there." She described what the ship had seen. "Terry thinks they're clouds."

"And you don't?"

"No. Clouds would get ripped apart in the gravity fields. They look like clouds, but it couldn't be. They have to be solid bodies. The lopsided appearance will turn out to be an illusion."

"They can't be hydrogen clouds?" asked Hutch.

"No."

"I thought there were a lot of hydrogen clouds."

"There are. But they don't come in this size. These are too small. I can't even imagine how such objects would form." She smiled, and looked pleased. "We'll keep an eye on them." Angela helped them lock down the 1600, and then went up front and took the pilot's seat. "Are we ready?"

They were.

"Okay. I'm going to seal off up here. The thing that I'm worried about is that you two and the sixteen hundred are all going to be concentrated on the starboard side. Don't make any sudden changes of position. And if I ask you to shut down, I want you to do it immediately, and move to the other side. Clear on that?

"If the thing does break loose and fall out, don't try to stop it. It doesn't weigh nearly as much as it looks, but neither do you. I don't want any dead people."

She wished them luck, and closed off the cockpit. Hutch sat down and made herself comfortable.

They would ride with the outer door open, because the unit's housing stuck out of the vehicle. They fastened tethers to their belts.

Angela engaged her engines, and they lifted off. The shuttle circled the three domes, turned east, and glided out over the plateau. The weather had cleared, and a light wind blew out of the north.

"The plateaus were probably carved by methane glaciers," Angela said. "It would be interesting to know whether this moon has periodic ice ages."

She continued in that vein, while Carson and Hutch endured an uncomfortable ride in back. They looked out at the endless snowscape, watched the edge of the plateau fall away, maybe two hundred meters, and they were cruising over the plain. Carsoa's idea was to do the easy ones first. Get the hang of the equipment.

Hutch wondered if Angela had ever flown before with an open cargo door. It was unlikely, but the woman knew her shuttle. It developed a drag, and a tendency to turn to starboard, but they seemed to be compensating.

The least challenging of the four mesas was on the south. It was already a passable rectangle, except that one side had partially collapsed and left a big hole in the symmetry. They'd have to square that off. For the rest, they wouldn't have to do much more than straighten the corners.

The projector's phase controls were set in a bright yellow teardrop case; its black mirror housing looked like a rifle barrel. There was provision for both automatic and manual operation. Rewriting the programming to factor in the shuttle was simply too time-consuming, so they had opted to go manual. "When in doubt," said Carson, "fly by the seat of your pants."

There was a pair of handgrips, a sight, and a trigger. But the instrument was unwieldy. So they ignored the trigger, and rigged a remote. The plan was that Carson would aim and, on command, Hutch would push the button.

"Coming up on target," said Angela. "Let's do a couple of flybys and see precisely how we want to do this."

Janet was surprised to discover that Harley Costa, whom she knew, had flown the original mission to 4418. At the time they'd met he was en route to Canopus. He was a busy little man who talked too fast, and who could not tolerate anyone who didn't share his passion for astronomy. Janet had taken the time to find out about his specialty, asked the right questions, and they'd become fast friends.

Harley didn't have much use for simple sentences. His energy overflowed ordinary syntax. His ideas sallied out to battle. He trampled (rather than refuted) opposing views, lit off objections with glee, and imposed decisions with crushing finality. Harley never expressed an opinion. He delivered truth. She wondered what sort of person his partner had been, cooped up with him for a year or so.

Reading through the report of his visit to 4418, she could hear his voice. Harley had found things to engage his interest here, as he did everywhere. He found volcanic and seismic activity in unlikely places, and an anomalous magnetic pattern around one of the gas giants. He took a series of measurements of the sun, and entertained himself by calculating the date of its eventual collapse.

They had surveyed the individual worlds, and moved on. Since Bode's Law told them where to look for worlds, they might not have bothered doing an intensive sweep, and it was therefore possible to understand how he might have missed other objects in the system, even objects of planetary dimensions.

Had the two objects been here at that time?

"Okay. Now."

Hutch punched the button, and a ruby beam flowed from the nozzle. Carson could feel the hair on his arms rise. The beam was pencil-thin. It flashed across the landscape, and bit into the ice.

"That's good," said Hutch. And, to Angela: "Ease it around to port just a mite. Okay. Hold it there." Carson knelt behind the unit, aiming it. He tracked vertically down the face of the cliff. A cloud of steam began to form. Ice, snow, and rock fell away. But the cloud grew, and obscured the target.

Carson shut the projector off. "This may take longer than we thought," he said.

The commlink chimed. Channel from Ashley. "Go ahead," said Angela's voice. It was Terry.

"Got some more information for you."

"I'm listening."

"Neither of the two objects is in solar orbit. They are passing through the system. They are not attached to it."

"Are you surel" Angela sounded skeptical.

"Yes, I'm sure. And here's something else for you: they are maintaining parallel courses. And they're moving at almost the same clip."

Carson grinned at Hutch, Maybe we've got the son of a bitch, and the smile widened as they heard Angela inhale the way she might if she were standing in front of an oncoming glidetrain.

Hutch broke in: "The velocity," she said. "What's the velocity?"

"Twenty-eight hundred for the far one and slowing down. Thirty-two and accelerating for the other."

"The speed of the wave," Hutch said hopefully. "They're in the neighborhood of the speed of the wave."

Carson was trying to keep his imagination under control. "Janet, what do you think?"

"Just what you're thinking."

Maybe that was it, that single piece of encouragement from the only other professional archeologist in the area. The old colonel's reserve fell away, and his eyes blazed. "Terry," he said, "how close will they come?"

"To us? One's already past," he said. "The other will get within thirty million klicks. Give or take a few."

"How big did you say it was?"

"It's twenty-three thousand kilometers wide. Sometimes."

"Sometimes?" asked Hutch. "What kind of thing is this?"

"We don't know. It isn't a sphere. We get a lot of different measurements. False readings, maybe. Hard to say."

The steam clung to the cliff wall. "It sounds as if the dragon might really be here," said Hutch.

"Premature," he said. But his expression belied detachment.

"I still think it's a cloud" said Drafts.

"Let's take another look," said Angela softly.

Thirty minutes later, they had piled back into the shelter, and were studying incoming images. The more distant object was little more than a misty star, a blur seen through heavy rain. But its companion was a thundercloud, lit ominously within, a storm on the horizon just after sunset.

"Well," said Angela, as if that single word summed up the inexplicable. "Whatever it is, just the fact that something is there, that anything is there, is significant. The intrusion of an extrasolar object into a planetary system is a rare event. I can't believe it just happened to occur while we're in the area. Since there are two of these things, I'd be willing to bet there are more coming. A lot more."

"Sounds like a wave to me," said Hutch.

"I didn't say that."

"Nevertheless it does."

"Unfortunately," said Janet, "if that's our critter, we're not going to get a very good look at it."

"Why not?" demanded Carson.

"Thirty million klicks is not close."

"I wouldn't worry," said Hutch. "If Angela is right, there'll be another along shortly. I think we ought to finish making our Oz, and see what happens."

On the Ashley, Janet and Drafts took turns monitoring the commlinks.

Unlike most of the hard-science specialists she knew, he had interests outside his chosen field. He had a sense of humor, he knew how to listen, and he encouraged her to talk about things she was interested in. She decided that if her duties required her to be holed up inside a tin can for a year with a single companion, Drafts would be easy to take.

He asked her about the book of Japanese poetry she'd been reading, and challenged her to produce a haiku. After a few minutes, and a lot of rewriting, she had one:

// they ask for me,

Say, she rides where comets go,

And outpaces light.

"Lovely," Drafts said.

"Your turn."

"I can't match that."

"Not if you don't try."

He sighed and picked up a pad. She watched him intently during the process. He smiled tentatively at her, struggled a lot, and finally presented her with one:

/ have walked on stars,

And sailed the channels of night.

To sip tea with you.

"I like it," she said.

His dark eyes found her. "I know it's not on a level with yours," he said. "But it's true."

Delta. Tuesday, May 17; 1535 hours.

The comer was almost a perfect 90 degrees. The problem was that the ice was brittle, and tended to crumble. But it was good enough. Carson called it a victory, cut power to the 1600, and accepted a handshake from his partner. "That's it, Angela," he said. "We're done for now. Let's go."

She acknowledged, and laid power to the engines.

They wheeled overhead and admired their work. Not bad for amateurs.

Angela spent the evening looking at the data coming in from Ashley. She kept moving files around, switching images, talking to herself.

"What's wrong?" asked Hutch.

"These things" she said. "There's no way to explain them. And I'm thinking where we're going to be if we let them get away and another one does not show up."

"Looking dumb?" suggested Hutch.

"To say the least. We've got a major discovery here. Whatever it is. They violate physical law. The one that's approaching us will pass the sun and apparently keep going. I mean, this thing is really traveling." She was quiet for a moment. "I don't know what holds them together."

"What are you suggesting, Angela?"

"I think we should arrange to take a close look as it goes by."

"Is there time?"

"We can arrange an intercept. We won't have much time alongside, because the ship can't begin to match the object's velocity in the time available. But we can get a quick glimpse, and maybe the sensors will be more effective up close." She looked at Carson. "What do you think?"

"Can't we catch it later if we have to?" He directed the question to Hutch.

She considered it. "Hazeltines are notoriously poor for pinpoint work. We did pretty well at Beta Pac, but that's the exception. Usually, you pick a star system, and land somewhere in the general neighborhood. With something that's moving trie way this thing is, if we let it get away, we might never see it again."

"I don't think running after it right now would be prudent," Carson said.

Angela frowned. "I can't see any problem. Terry's a good pilot. And he will keep a respectful distance."

"No," he said.

"Frank," said Angela, "the real risk is in not going."

He rolled his eyes and opened a channel to the ship. "Let's talk about it," he told her.

Janet appeared on the main display. "How's the Neighborhood Improvement Group doing?"

"Not bad," said Carson. "Where's Terry?"

"Right here." The screen split.

"What would you think about intercepting the object? Go out and take a close look?"

He consulted his display and blew unhappily through his fingers. "We'd need to move pretty fast. I make it about two and a half days at max to lay in alongside it."

"Can you wait for us?"

"Frank, this ride is already going to hurt."

"How do you feel about doing it?"

He looked over at Janet. "You game?"

"Sure."

They could see his reluctance. "I don't know," he said.

"Terry," pleaded Angela, "we might not get another chance."

Hutch looked at her. She wanted this badly, and it was clouding her judgment. "It would leave us without a ship," she pointed out. "I don't know whether that's a good idea either."

"Don't need one," said Angela.

Janet shrugged. "Don't hesitate because of me."

"I can't see," said Angela, "that there's anything to lose."

Carson wanted to go. That was obvious. But the assorted shocks on this expedition had taken their toll. Hutch could see his natural instincts struggling with his newfound caution. And she saw them win. "Anybody else with an objection?"

Drafts looked sidewise at his partner. "If Angela wants it, and Janet has no problem, I'd like to do it."

"Okay." Colonel Carson returned. "Let's go."

There were a few last-minute technical conversations. Drafts entered flight requirements into the navigation systems. They would use Flickinger fields to help negate some of the effects of acceleration.

Within thirty minutes of making the decision, the Ashley Tee lifted out of orbit into an acceleration that mashed its crew into their seats.

"You okay?" asked Drafts.

"Fine," she said breathlessly.

"It'll be a sixty-two hour run."

In the screens, Delta, the orange ice world, diminished rapidly to a small globe, and then to a point of light. After a while, only the gas giant remained. Soon it too was only a bright star.

LIBRARY ENTRY

Dragon in the dark,

Your eyes move across the stars,

Your breath warms the moon.

— April 24, 2203 (Found in unassigned file on Ashley Tee)

29 Delta. Wednesday, May 18; 0930 hours

The operation on the small mesa had gone so well that they hoped to finish by the end of the day.

They sliced and buffed until they had three smooth rock walls set at (almost) right angles to each other. Then they turned to the task of straightening the fourth side, with its massive notch. Carson regretted not having the capability to fill the indentation rather than have to pare off the walls on either side. But never mind: he would manage.

They had developed reasonable facility with the 1600, and were now enjoying themselves. Whenever possible, they stationed themselves on the ground. But for the most part it was necessary to take to the air, and work from above the mesa. Angela pointed out that they were in violation of a wide variety of safety procedures. But she swallowed her reservations, took them up, and, on signal, rolled the shuttle onto its side. In back, restrained by his tether and Hutch's makeshift harness, Carson rode the 1600, looking straight down. "You're perfectly safe," Hutch assured him.

After about an hour, they changed places. Hutch enjoyed aiming the big cannon, and they learned how to employ the sensors to see through the steam, and so became more proficient. By the time they broke for lunch, a substantial portion of the rear wall lay in rubble. But they had a rectangle!

The limiting factor in getting to the rendezvous point and laying in alongside the cloud was not the capability of the ship, but that of its crew to withstand prolonged acceleration. They would arrive with aching joints and sore backs, and they would have only a few seconds before the target sailed past and left them hopelessly behind. To ameliorate these effects,

Drafts programmed in frequent breaks in the acceleration, during which they could get up and move around. It would not be a comfortable ride, but it would be livable.

Hutch distrusted hastily planned maneuvers as a matter of instinct. She wondered at the necessity for this trip. Angela's logic made sense: there was probably another one coming. Why not go after it at their leisure? She was annoyed that Janet had not supported her. Instead, she'd allowed herself to get caught up in the general enthusiasm. They were making snap decisions again, without considering all the consequences. She wondered whether they had learned anything at Beta Pac.

She derived some satisfaction from knowing that Janet was now pinned in her webchair by the acceleration. Served her right.

They inspected their work on the south mesa. Seen from the air, it was a child's block, an orange rectangle. "I wish we could change its color," said Carson. "The Oz-structures were highly reflective, and they stood out from their surroundings."

"You think that matters?" asked Hutch.

"I don't know. It might."

It occurred to Hutch that the pumpkin-colored block below might be as hard for some future mission to explain as Oz had been.

The eastern mesa was next. It was three times as big as the one they had just worked on, less regular, heavily scored. Moreover, when they started on it, they discovered it was brittle. Its walls shriveled at the touch of the energy beam, and whole sections crumbled away. They experimented with intensity and angle, and discovered that overhead shots with low power worked best. "Like everything else," Carson said as they sliced and polished, "the only thing that succeeds is finesse. The light touch."

Communication with Ashley was becoming difficult. After twenty-four hours, the ship had traveled approximately fifteen million kilometers. At that distance, laserburst signals required almost two minutes to make a round trip. Conversations became slow and frustrating, and the two groups began to feel their isolation from each other.

The ground team slept through the night-phase. But all three were up early, anxious to get started. They treated themselves to a substantial breakfast, and went back to the eastern plateau.

They hoped to finish the wall they'd started the previous day, and fashion the corner. Hutch liked doing comers. They were a break from the routine.

Because much of the work was done from the air, Angela was usually alone in the cockpit. There, she watched the visuals coming in from Ashley, pictures of the oncoming object. Of the cloud, tiny and purple and utterly impossible.

Sometimes she had to draw back, remind herself where she was, remember to keep her mind on the mission, on the people who were hanging out the cargo door. But My God, this was a magnificent time.

The only downside was that she was not on board Ashley.

On the other end, Drafts was by turns ecstatic and depressed. The sensors still gave them only superficial readings. "What I'd like to do," he told Angela, "is put our money where our mouth is and lay Ashley right in front of it. Let it run over us, and see what happens." That got her attention, even though she didn't believe he meant it. But she stabbed the Transmit key anyhow and told him to forget anything like that, that she would have his career if he even so much as raised the suggestion again. But he added, long before her threats could have reached him, "Of course I won't. I don't think the probes will do much good, but we'll try to insert one."

Later, when they were back on the ground, Carson came forward for lunch. Hutch remained in back because the cockpit was too crowded for all three. He was munching on a sandwich, and Angela was planning the next day's flight, when, between mouthfuls, he said, "What's that?"

He was looking at the overhead display.

The object had developed fingers.

And despite all her training, the intellectual habits of a lifetime, the unshakable conviction that the universe is ultimately rational and knowable, Angela suffered an uneasy twinge. "Don't know," she said, almost angry, as if it were somehow Carson's doing.

Extensions. Not really fingers, but protrusions. Prominences.

"Seven," said Angela. "I count seven."

"One of them's dividing," said Carson.

They grew long and narrow. Hutch thought they looked like the fingers of the wizard in The Sorcerer's Apprentice.

"Have we got measurements?" asked Carson.

Angela checked the status board. "The longest is twenty thousand kilometers, plus or minus six percent. We don't have a reading yet on the expansion rate."

"They're contrails," said Hutch.

Yes. They were. Angela felt relieved, and then foolish, as if she had not known all along it would be something prosaic. "Yes," she said.

The contrails began to lose their definition. They drifted apart, overlapped, bled together. The illusion dissipated. It might have been a wispy comet with a multitude of tails. Or an airship that had exploded.

Got to be enormous disruptions to throw all that off. "I think it's coming apart," Angela said.

The chime sounded, and Drafts's image blinked on. "Take a look at the target," he said.

Carson held up a hand. "We see it." Drafts did not react, of course. His image was delayed by several minutes.

Angela was caught up in a swirl of emotions. "Lovely," she said. Nothing in her life, which had been reasonably full, had prepared her for what she was feeling now. Unable to restrain herself, she let go a cheer, and jabbed a fist skyward. "Good stuff," she said. "But what is that thing?"

It looked as if it were unraveling.

Long smoky comets rolled glacially away from the object.

"What the hell's going on?" Drafts's voice again.

The process continued, almost too slowly for the eye to follow. Bursts of conversation passed between the pod and the ship. Drafts thought the object was disintegrating, dissolving as it should have done earlier amid the fierce tides of the gravitational fields.

"But why wow?" demanded Angela. "Why not yesterday? Why not last week? It's not as if local gravity has changed in any significant way."

"The other one got through," said Hutch. "Why would this one explode?"

"I don't think it's really exploding," Angela said without taking her eyes from the screen. "It's hard to see clearly, but I think all that's happening is that some of the outer cloud cover is peeling off."

"What would cause that?"

"I don't know," she said. "This thing doesn't seem to obey physical law."

She took to replaying the entire sequence at fast forward. The object opened slowly and gracefully, a blood-red flower with blooming petals offering itself to the sun.

The ground team continued with their efforts at block carving. They wielded the 1600 and shaped and molded the ice, and took pleasure in their growing skills. And they watched the numbers coming in on the dragon.

Toward the end of the day's operations, Angela called Carson's attention to the screens. But Carson was riding the saddle. "Neither of us is in a position to look right now," he said. "What is it?"

The object might have been a comet whose head had exploded. "It's turning" she said. "I'll be damned. It's changing course. That's what all the earlier activity was about. It's been pitching material off into space."

"Isn't that impossible?" Hutch asked. "I mean, natural objects don't throw turns, do they?"

"Not without help." Outside, the land looked empty and cold and inhuman. Soaked in ruby light, where anything could happen.

"Where is it going?" Carson asked.

"Don't know. We won't be able to tell until it completes the maneuver. But it has turned inside Ashley's projected course. Toward us, actually." She tried to keep the sense of melodrama out of her voice, but it was difficult not to scream the words.

"You sure?" That was Hutch.

"I'm sure that it's turning in our general direction."

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Hutch's face appeared on one of the screens. That was good. They needed to be able to see each other now.

"Son of a bitch," said Hutch. "Is it possible the thing knows we're here?"

"What the hell," said Carson, "is that thing?"

"That's the question," said Angela, "we keep asking, isn't it?"

"You'd better let Ashley know," said Hutch.

"I've got a call in."

They stared at one another for a long moment. "Maybe we ought to think about getting out of here," said Hutch.

Carson put a hand on her shoulder but said nothing.

Angela had the same thought. But they needed to avoid jumping to conclusions. Celestial bodies do not chase people. "I don't know whether you two are aware of it," she said, "but we've got the daddy of all anomalies here. We are all going down in the history books."

"Just so we don't all go down," said Hutch.

"Angela." It was Drafts, looking confused. "I don't know where it's going, but it sure as hell isn't going to the same place we are. It's swinging inside us, and we can't brake quickly enough to adjust to its new course. Whatever that turns out to be. We'll have to loop around and try again. This is going to become a marathon. We'll need several extra days now to make a rendezvous. Can't really be specific until the thing settles down." He shook his head. "This can't be happening. I'll get back to you as soon as we know what's going on."

Angela was a study in frustration. "That can't be right," she said. "They had just enough time to get out to it before. Now he thinks he can take a couple of days to turn around, and catch up to it?"

"He just hasn't thought it out yet," said Carson.

"Maybe. But he might know something we don't."

"If he did, wouldn't he mention it?"

"Sure. Unless he assumed we all had the same information."

"Ask him."

"Maybe there's no need." Angela looked at the numbers again and started her subroutines. Meantime, she noted that her power cells had dropped inside safety margins. "That's it, kids," she said. "Saddle up. We're going home."

Nobody talked much on the way back, but once they got inside the shelter she told them what Drafts had known: "It's decelerating. It's thrown on the brakes."

"That's why it's coming apart," said Hutch.

"Yes, I would say so. Despite appearances, it's apparently pretty tightly wrapped, considering what it's able to do. But this maneuver is a bit much even for the mechanism that holds it together."

Carson asked the question that might have been on everyone's mind: "Is it a natural object?"

"Of course it is," said Angela. But she was speaking from common sense, not from knowledge.

"How can it change directions?" asked Hutch. "And what sort of braking mechanism could it have?"

"Maybe there's something out there exerting force on it," Angela said. "A superdense object, possibly."

"You think that's what's happening?" asked Carson. He had thrown off his jacket, and was making for the coffee pot.

"No." There would have been other effects, advance indications, orbital irregularities. There was none of that. "No," she said. "I have no explanation. But that doesn't mean we need to bring in malevolent agencies."

"Who said malevolent?" asked Hutch.

They exchanged looks, and Angela let the question hang. "It's reacting to something. Has to be. Magnetic fields, maybe. Maybe there's been a solar burp of some kind. Hard to tell, sitting down here." She shrugged. "We'll just have to wait and see."

"Angela," said Hutch, "Is this thing like a cloud? Chemically?"

"Yes," she said. "It's constructed of the same kind of stuff as the big clouds that stars condense from: particles of iron, carbon, silicates. Hydrogen. Formaldehyde. And there's probably a large chunk of iron or rock inside."

Hutch tasted her coffee. It was spiced with cinnamon. "There were concentrations of formaldehyde," she said, "in the soil around Oz."

"I didn't know that," said Angela. "Is that true?"

"Yes, it is."

She looked out at the sun, which was still high in the southwest. It was only marginally closer to the horizon than it had been when they arrived.

"So how does it brake?" asked Hutch again.

Angela thought about it. "One way would be what we've seen: to hurl material outward. Like a rocket. Another way would be to manipulate gravity fields."

"Is that possible?" asked Carson.

"Not for us. But if anti-gravity is possible, and the evidence suggests it is, then yes, it could be done." Angela fell silent for a few moments. "Listen: let's cut to reality here. Just the existence of this thing implies wholesale manipulation of gravity, of tidal forces, and of damned near every other kind of force I can think of. It's almost as if the thing exists in a dimensional vacuum, where nothing from the outside touches it."

"Almost?"

"Yes. Almost. Look: there are ftvo clouds. Let's assume both were traveling at the same velocity when they entered the planetary system. They should have broken up, but they didn't. The one on the far side of the sun is moving more slowly than this one. That's as it should be, because it's contending with solar drag, while our baby here is getting pulled along as it moves toward the sun. So there is some effect. But don't ask me to explain it."

Angela drifted out of the conversation while she watched the object, and the readouts. The cometary tail, which (in obedience to physical law) was leading the object, had become harder to see as the head turned toward them. Now its last vestiges virtually disappeared into the red cloudscape. After a while she turned back to them. "It's coming here," she said.

They watched the image. Watched for the tail to appear on the other side. It did not.

Their eyes touched. "Target angle stable," she added.

Hutch paled. "When?"

Carson said, "This can't be happening. We're being chased by a cloud?"

"If it continues to decelerate at its present rate, I would say Monday. About 0100."

"We'd better let Terry know," said Carson. "Get them back here and pick us up."

Hutch shook her head. "I don't think so. They're moving away from us at a pretty good clip. My guess is that it will be noon Sunday before they can even get turned around."

Bedtime. Angela noticed Hutch in front of a display, her expression wistful, perhaps melancholy. She sat down with her. "We'll do fine," she said. "It can't really be after us."

"I know," said Hutch. "It's an illusion."

The screen was filled with poetry.

"What is it?" Angela asked.

"Maggie's notebooks." Her eyes met Angela's, but looked quickly away. "I think there was a lot about the woman that I missed."

Angela's gaze intensified, but she didn't speak.

Hutch brought up a file. "This is from Urik at Sunset."

It was a group of prayers and songs celebrating the deeds of the Quraquat hero. Epic in tone, they retained a highly personal flavor. "Urik was to be experienced up close," Maggie commented in the accompanying notes, "and not from a distance in the manner of terrestrial heroes."

She went on: "Show me what a people admire, and I will tell you everything about them that matters."

And, finally, a prayer that seemed particularly pertinent:

My spirit glides above the waters of the world, Because you are with me.

They looked east across the sky. It will come from that direction. Over there. It would come in over the coffee-colored sea. If the sun would set, which of course it won't for several more days, they'd be able to see it now. "It'll probably become visible during the next twelve hours," Angela said.

What was the old line from the Rubaiyatl

But who was now the potter?

And who the pot?

The snowfields were broad and serene.

Delta. Friday, May 20; 0900 hours.

Hutch was not happy. "What are our options?" she asked.

"How about clearing out now?" suggested Carson. "Get in the shuttle and go. Get away from Delta altogether."

Angela considered it. "I don't think the odds would be good. The shuttle was designed for ship-to-ship operations. It was never intended for use in gravity wells. It doesn't have much power. We can't really get clear, and I don't think we want to play tag with that monster. No. Listen, it's moving pretty slowly now. I suggest we stay where we are. Go around the other side of the world and hide."

"I agree," said Hutch. She depolarized the viewing panels, letting the red daylight in. "We know there were survivors on Quraqua and Nok: these things don't kill everybody. Let's just dig in."

"Listen," said Carson, "is it really going to score a direct hit on usT'

"Yes," Angela said. "I don't think there's any doubt about it. It'll come in about thirty degrees off the horizon, and it'll land right in our coffee. Incidentally, its timing is perfect. If it were a little earlier, or a little later, it wouldn't have a clear shot at us. At the mesas, I mean."

Carson's stomach tightened. Its timing is perfect. "Okay," he said. "Let's make for the other side. Let the moon absorb the impact. After that happens, we clear out. If we can." His face was grim. "So now we know about Oz. It was intended to draw the goddam thing. I can't believe it. The sons of bitches deliberately arranged to bomb the civilizations on Nok and Quraqua. They must have been psychos."

"Let's talk about it later," said Angela. "We've got things to do."

"Right," said Carson. "Let's start by rearranging the cameras to get the best record we can."

"There is something else we could try," said Hutch. "Maybe our blocks worked better than we expected. We could blow them up. Pull the bait out of the water."

Angela shook her head. "I don't think it would matter now. It's late. That thing is coming for dinner no matter what we do."

The outermost moon in the system orbited the gas giant at a range of eighteen million kilometers. It was little more than a barrel-shaped rock, with barely the surface area of Washington, D.C. It was a fairly typical boulder, battered and ill-used. An observer in that moon's northern hemisphere would, during these hours, have been looking at a fearsome sky, a blood-red sky, filled by a vast fiery river. The river knew no banks and no limits: it drove the stars before it, and even the sun was lost in the brilliance of its passage.

30 Delta. Saturday, May 21; 1010 hours

They watched the dragon rise, a massive cloudbank, swollen and infected. Streamers and tendrils rolled toward them, over the eastern horizon.

The cameras had optical, infrared, X-ray, and short-range sensor capabilities. They were state-of-the-art stuff, but Hutch didn't think they were going to last long when things began to happen.

They picked three sites, each a half-kilometer outside the general target area. Two were on high ground. They slipped the cameras into makeshift housings, and bolted the units into the ice. One was set to track the approach of the dragon, and the others to scan the target area.

When they'd finished they ran tests, adjusted the power cells, and executed a successful drill from the cockpit. Afterward, they retired to the dome for a turkey luncheon. Hearty meal, thought Hutch. Good for morale.

They cracked a couple of bottles of Chablis, and made jokes about the weather.

No one had much appetite. In a world that had lost its anchor to reality, it was hard to get seriously involved with a turkey sandwich. Anything now seemed possible.

Long ago, when she was nine years old, Hutch had gone with her father to see Michael Fairish, the magician. It had been an evening filled with floating cabinets, people getting sawed in half, and a black box that yielded an unending supply of doves, rabbits, and red and white kerchiefs. Priscilla Hutchins had tried to fathom the methods used by the magician, but she had been astonished time and again. And although she knew that trickery was involved, that magic wasn't real, she had nevertheless lost touch with the physical world, and reached a point at which the impossible failed to surprise her.

She was at that point now.

After dinner, she went outside and sat down in the snow. She let the alienness of the scene suck at her, as if it might extract some hidden part, and infuse a portion of itself, a particle of enchantment that would re-establish a cable to comprehension. It was almost as if this world had been placed here exclusively for her and her companions, that it had waited through billions of unchanging years for precisely this moment.

The others joined her after a while, en route to other tasks, but they too paused in the growing radiance of the thing in the east.

Ashley continued to relay updates on the dragon, which was still running hot and true. Drafts was sliding from professional acceptance to near-panic, and had begun urging them to use the shuttle to get off-world. Janet, who had perhaps been through too much with Hutch and Carson, merely told them she knew they'd be okay.

After a while, they got up and straggled over to the shuttle. They disconnected the 1600 and carried it inside the dome. Not that it would matter when the fire fell out of the sky.

They began packing.

"I don't think we should wait until tomorrow," said Angela. "I'd feel better if we cleared out tonight."

"We live better here," said Carson. "There's no point in scrunching up in the shuttle for an extra day." He went inside and came back with more Chablis. To prove the point.

So they waited under the hammer and debated whether they would be safer on the ground or in the air at the moment of impact. Whether it wasn't paranoid to think they were actually being chased by this thing. ("It's not us" each of them said, in one form or another. "It's seen the mesas. It's the mesas it's coming after.") Whether, if they made a run for it, the object would adjust course again and come after them. Them, and damn the mesas. After a while, despite the tension, Hutch couldn't keep her eyes open. No one went to bed that night; they all slept in the common room, stretched out in chairs.

Hutch woke, it seemed, every few minutes. And she decided, if she ever went through anything like this again (which she would, but that's another story), she'd by God, clear out at the first hint of funny business.

Somewhere around five, she smelled coffee. Angela held out a cup.

"Hi," said Hutch.

The dragon was an angry smear in the sky.

"I'll be glad," said Angela, "when we're out of here."

There was a ring around the sun, and a thick haze over the plain. A half-moon had broken through in the southwest.

Fresh snow lay on the ground when Angela and Hutch came out of the dome, carrying their bags. There were a few flakes in the air. "It's frustrating when you think about it," said Angela. "Cosmic event like this, and we have to go hide on the other side of the world."

Hutch climbed into the shuttle. "I suppose we could stay, if you insist," she said.

"No. I didn't mean that." Angela handed her bags through, took her place at the controls, and studied her checklist. "But I wish we had a ship, so we could lay off somewhere and watch the fireworks." Hutch activated the commlink, and picked up the feed from Ashley. The dragon blinked on. The view wasn't good now because the ship was very distant. And still retreating.

Angela thought the main body might be more than a million kilometers behind the forward spouts. Yet the mind still saw it as a thundercloud. An ominous thundercloud. Belching and roiling and flickering. But still only a thundercloud. She tried to imagine a similar visitation over the Temple of the Winds. What would a nontechnological race have made of this harpy? And she wondered about the Monument-Makers. Why had they sicked it on that unfortunate race? And left their final ironic taunt? Farewell and good fortune. Seek us by the light of the horgon's eye.

And, in that moment, she understood.

The comm panel blinked. "Incoming," said Angela.

David Emory's face blinked on. "Hello, ground station," he said. "What's happening? Do you need help?"

Relief and pleasure swept through Hutch. "David, hello. Where are you?" But he did not react. She watched and counted off the seconds while her signal traveled outward to him, and her newborn hope died. He was too far away.

Carson climbed through the hatch. "I see the cavalry has arrived," he said. "Where are they?"

David broke into a wide smile. "Hutch. It's good to see you. I'm on the Gary Knapp. What is that thing! What's going on?"

Hutch gave him a capsulized version.

"We'll get there as quickly as we can."

"Stay clear," she said. "Stay clear until the dust settles."

By mid-morning they were in the air.

They all watched the dragon: Emory on the Knapp, Janet and Drafts on Ashley, and Carson's group in the shuttle.

The pictures now were coming from the Knapp. They were clearer than anything they'd had before. Delta resembled a child's ball floating before a cosmic wall of black cloud.

They were about to be swallowed.

Enormous fountains of gas and vapor billowed away; vast explosions erupted in slow time, as if occurring in a different temporal mode. Fiery blossoms disconnected and drifted away. "It's disintegrating," Angela said. "It's moving quite slowly now, and I'd guess it's thrown off seventy percent of its mass. It's coming here, but afterward it won't be going anywhere else."

They'd left the plain and its mesas behind, and were gliding above a nitrogen swamp, bathed in the shifting light. Carson was in the right-hand seat. He kept making remarks like "My God, I don't believe this," and "No wonder they all got religion."

Gales battered the craft. Hutch, in back, wondered whether they'd be able to stay in the air. She watched the pictures coming in from Knapp. "The gas giant's tearing it up," she said, straining to make herself heard over the wind. "If we're lucky, maybe there won't be any of it left when it gets here."

"Forget that idea," said Angela. She took a deep breath. "It's a Chinese puzzle. Have you noticed anything odd?"

Carson studied the display. "Have I noticed anything odd!" He stifled laughter.

She ignored the reaction. "No quakes," she said.

"I don't follow."

But Hutch did. "It's fifteen hours away. Does this place have plates?"

"Yes."

She looked at Carson. "A celestial body that close should be raising hell with local tectonics. Right?"

"That's right." Angela poked her keyboard, asked for new data. "If nothing else, we should be getting major tidal surges." The swamp had given way to a mud-colored sea. Thick, slow waves rolled ashore. A few meters higher up, the rock was discolored. "That would be high tide," she said. "This doesn't look like anything unusual."

"What's the point?" asked Carson.

"The point is that these oceans, even these kinds of oceans, ought to be jumping out of their beds. Hold on." She opened the Knapp channel, and asked David to get readings on the positions of the satellites. While she waited, she brought up the entire file on the gas giant and its family of moons. She established orbits, computed velocities, and calculated lunar positions.

When the ship began relaying its information, she checked her predictions.

Tau, the misshapen rock at the edge of the system, had strayed out of its orbit. But by only about four hundred kilometers. Negligible. Rho was two hundred kilometers in advance of her predicted position. Everything else, within tolerances, was correct.

The sun was rising again as the shuttle gained on it. They were moving out over a gasoline swamp. Behind them, the sky burned.

"It's not solid," said Hutch.

"That's right," Angela announced with finality. "It's a dust cloud, after all. Has to be. There might be a solid core in there somewhere, but it must be small."

"But a rock," said Hutch, "even a big rock, isn't going to hold that thing together."

"That's right, Hutch. Find the glue and win yourself a Nobel."

Sunday; 1146 hours.

The thing on the monitors seemed like a visitant out of the old tales. A messenger from the Almighty. Carson wondered what the skies had looked like over Egypt on the first Passover? What the weather report had been for Sodom? What they'd seen from the walls at Jericho?

Something deep in his instincts signaled the approach of the supernatural. Out here, pursued by an apparently angry cosmic anomaly, watching it close in, Carson was getting religion.

He made no effort to shrug the idea off; rather he aggressively entertained it, wondering where it might lead. Might beings with cosmic power actually exist? If they were confronting one here, it was manifesting a disquieting interest in the more primitive races. A stupid god, driven to destroy right angles. A thing dispensing serious trouble to those who defied the divine edict to build only in the round.

He scanned through the religious and romantic art of Nok and Quraqua, as recorded in Maggie's records, looking for correlations. He found some. Here was a cloud demon of terrifying similarity to the thing in the sky. And there, a dark god with red eyes and lunging talons emerging from a storm.

1411 hours.

Lightning flickered through the gasoline-drenched skies. Ethyl rain swept in torrents across the windscreen, and clung to the shuttle's wings. Angela would have gone higher, above the atmosphere, but the turbulence was strong, and intensifying. She was not certain she could make it safely back down when the time came.

It was, by turns, terrifying and ecstatic. The shuttle rolled and plunged. When she wasn't fighting for control of the vehicle, she was dreaming of glory. She would always be associated with this phenomenon. It might even one day carry her name: the Morgan. She liked the sound of it, rolled it around her tongue. Visualized future scholars addressing seminars: Several categories of Morgans are known to exist.

Well, maybe not.

Carson was imagining a wave of dragon clouds, perhaps thousands of light-years long, swirling out of the Void, an irresistible, diabolical tide. Drowning entire worlds, with clocklike precision. Pumped into the system by the rhythm of a cosmic heart. And not one wave. Three waves. Maybe a thousand waves, their crests separated by 108 light-years.

To what purpose?

Was it happening everywhere? All along the Arm? On the other side of the Galaxy? "The big telescope," he said.

Hutch looked at him. "Pardon?"

"I was thinking about the telescope at Beta Pac. It was pointed toward the Magellanic Clouds."

"You figure out why?"

"Maybe. The Monument-Makers knew about the dragons. Do you think they might have been trying to find out whether other places were safe? Beyond this galaxy?"

Hutch listened to her pulse. "That's a good question," she said.

1600 hours.

The Knapp was approaching from sunward. Carson talked at length with David Emory. Despite the time delay, the conversations distracted him from the moment-to-moment terrors of the ride through that fierce sky. Emory asked about everything, the conditions in the city by the harbor, what they had seen at the space station, how they had found the dragon. He expressed his sorrow at the loss of their colleagues. He had known Maggie, had worked with her, admired her. "I never met George," he said.

Carson had by then changed places with Hutch. In the cockpit, Angela asked if she understood why Emory was so inquisitive.

"He doesn't expect us to survive," she guessed. "He doesn't want mysteries afterward. So he's getting all his questions in now."

1754 hours.

They had left the dragon behind, and the sun as well, and passed onto the night side. But an eerie red glow lay on the horizon. Below, the land flowed past, rendered soft and glossy by the snow. "We'll go another hour or so," Angela said, "and then we'll look for a plain somewhere, as flat as we can find, where nothing can fall on us."

The pictures coming in from Knapp revealed that the anomaly had become so tenuous, so inflated, so unraveled, that one could not say precisely where it was. It seemed to have spilled across the system of moons and rings.

At the target area, monitored by the cameras, boiling light filled the sky.

7952 hours.

The shuttle cleared a range of glaciers and glided low over country that was flat and featureless, save for a few hills on the horizon. They had come approximately halfway around the globe. "Ideal," said Carson. "Let's park it right here."

On board NCA Ashley Tee. 2006 hours.

Ashley reached the end of its forward flight. For a microsecond, a flicker of a moment, it came to an absolute halt, relative to Delta. Then the instant was gone, and it reversed course and began its return. Inside the ship, the moment would have gone unnoticed (the thrust, after all, continued unabated from the same quarter of the vessel), had not a green console lamp blinked on.

"Closing," said Drafts. He knew that Janet had seen the signal, had in fact been watching for it. But it was something to say. A benchmark to be noted. They were, at last, on their way.

2116 hours.

Angela gave up trying to raise the ships. "It's getting worse," she said. Her gauges were all over the park. "That thing is putting out a hurricane of low-frequency radiation, mostly in the infrared, microwave, and radio bands. But we're lucky: it could just as easily be generating X-rays, and fry us all."

Their own sky was almost serene, save for the angry glow on the horizon.

2304 hours.

Two hours to impact. More or less. With so ephemeral an object, who could know?

Transmissions from the mesa site were garbled beyond recovery. Angela switched away from them. She also shut down all nonessential systems, and did a strange thing: she turned out the cockpit lights, as if to conceal the location of the shuttle.

The conversation was desultory. They talked about incidentals, how strange the sky looked, how nobody was going to leave home again. And they reassured one another.

Had long-dead Pinnacle experienced these things? "They have to be part of the natural order," Carson said. "Every eight thousand years they come in and take you out. Why?"

"It's almost as if," said Angela, "the universe is wired to attack cities. Is that possible?"

Hutch sat in the darkness, feeling like prey. What was the line Richard had quoted? Something there is that doesn't love a wall. "It might be," she said, "that it's part of a program to protect life."

Carson's brows drew together. "By blowing it up?"

"By discouraging the rise of dominant species. Maybe it's a balancing effect. Maybe the universe doesn't approve of places like New York."

In the west, they saw lightning. Coming this way.

"Air pressure's going down fast," said Angela. The ground shook. It was only a tremor, a wobble. "Maybe we should get back upstairs."

"No." Carson sank into his chair and tried to relax. "We're safer here."

Monday; 0004 hours.

Ashley was accelerating. But whatever was going to happen would be over long before they arrived on the scene. Janet had spent much of her time trying to talk with Emory, but the signals had faded in the electromagnetic flux created by the dragon. On her screens, Delta and the thing had joined. Drafts was frantic, and had grown worse as the hour approached. He was not helped by the loss of communications. And being pinned in his web chair did nothing to ease his frustration.

Janet tried to sound optimistic. Hutch and Angela Morgan together! If there was a way to survive, she knew one or the other would find it.

0027 hours.

The skies flowed past, churned, exploded. Heavy bolts ripped the night, and the wind howled around them. Snow and ice rattled against the shuttle.

The plain trembled. One by one, the shuttle's monitors died.

Carson hovered in the rear doorway, between the two women. "We're doing okay," he said.

"Never better," said Hutch.

"You betcha," said Angela, with mock cheer. "Here we sit with God coming after us."

"We'll be fine," said Carson.

There was no point at which it could be said that contact actually occurred. The dragon no longer possessed defini-

live limits. It had opened out. Filaments tens of thousands of kilometers long had broached Delta's atmosphere hours earlier. But Carson and the women knew that the moon was now firmly in the embrace of its fierce visitor.

The air was thick with ash and snow. It drifted down onto the plain, and a black crust began to form.

"Maybe," said Angela, "there really is no core."

"Let's hope not," said Carson. And he was about to add, optimistically, that maybe it wouldn't be much worse than a large storm after all, when white light exploded overhead, and a fireball roared out of the sky and ripped into the snowscape.

It wasn't close, but they all flinched.

"What was that?"

"Meteor?"

"Don't know—"

"Damn," said Hutch.

Carson took a deep breath. "Angela, how long do you think this will last?"

"Hard to tell. The worst of it should end within a day or two. It's still moving pretty quickly. And it's not tracking Delta's orbit, so we should come out of it fairly soon." They could hear her breathing in the dark. "I think this place is going to have even lousier weather than usual for a while though."

"I'm scared," said Hutch.

So was Carson. But he knew it would be improper to concede the point. Someone needed to show strength. "We'll be okay," he told her. He wished they could get pictures from the ground cameras. What was happening at the site?

The dragon's head dissolved. Billows and fountains expanded, collapsed, and blew apart. They rubbed together like great cats. Chunks of rock and ice, apparently buried within the thick atmosphere, were expelled.

On Delta, methane seas exploded into nearby low-lying areas. Tornado-force winds, generated by sudden changes in pressure, roared around the globe. Everywhere, it was midnight.

Rock and ice fell out of the sky. Their fiery trails illuminated the general chaos. Most were small, too small to penetrate even the relatively thin atmosphere. Others plowed into ice fields, and blasted swamps and seas.

Volcanoes erupted.

Out on their plain, Hutch, Angela, and Frank crouched in the shuttle and waited. Waited for the world-cracking collision that would come when the core of the dragon struck ground. As it must. As Angela, despite her assurances to the contrary, sincerely believed it must.

But it never happened.

The winds hammered at them, and the plain trembled, and black rain and ice and thick ashes poured down.

The night rumbled and flared.

Gradually, they became persuaded that the worst was over, that the hurricane-force winds were diminishing. They would survive; they needed only ride out the storm. And they grew talkative. An atmosphere that might best be described as nervous festive set in. Things banged and exploded and crunched in the night. But they were still there. And they silently congratulated themselves on their good luck. At one point, their rising spirits were helped along when they thought they heard Janet's voice in the ocean of static pouring out of the receivers.

Navigation lights were mounted low on both sides of the cowling, behind the cockpit on the fuselage, and beneath the wings. Periodically, Angela blew the snow and soot off the windscreen and turned them on. Mounds were building high around them.

"I'll make you a bet, Frank," said Hutch.

"Which is—?"

"When we start reading the history of the Monument-Makers, we're going to discover that a lot of them cleared out."

"How do you mean?"

"Left the Galaxy. Probably went to one of the Magellanic Clouds. Somewhere where they don't have these things."

"Maybe. I think they entertained themselves bringing them down on the heads of whatever primitives they could find. I don't think the Monument-Makers were very decent critters."

"I think you've got it wrong," she said.

"In what way?"

She took Carson's wrist. "Oz was a decoy," she said.

He leaned closer to her. "Say again."

"Frank, they were all decoys. The cube moons. The Oz-creation at Beta Pac. They were supposed to draw these things off."

"Well, if they were," he said, "they apparently didn't work."

"No. I guess they did the best they could. But you're right. They didn't work. In the end, the Monument-Makers couldn't even save themselves."

He sat down on the deck behind her seat. "You think they got hit by one of these things?"

"I think they got hit twice. The interstellar civilization probably got nailed. They collapsed. Maybe they ran. I don't know. Maybe they got out and made for the Lesser Magellanic. Ran from these things because they couldn't divert them, and couldn't stop them."

"What about the space station?" he asked. "What do you think happened there?"

"— Survivors. Somebody rebuilt. But they didn't get as far the second time. They didn't go interstellar. Maybe it was a different type of civilization. Maybe they lost too much. They were just at the beginning of their space age when the wave came again." She was glad now for the dark. "Frank, think what their technology must have been at its height. And how much advance warning they had. Maybe thousands of years. They knew these things were out there, and they tried to help where they could. But you're right: they didn't succeed."

"The goop is getting a little high," said Angela. "I think it would be a good idea to shift locations. We don't want to get buried."

"Do it," said Carson.

She took them up. Their navigation lights, freed, spilled out over the black snow. The wind rocked the vessel, swept it clean.

Lightning lanced through the night. They timed the distant rumble, guessed at the effect of local air pressure. It was about twelve kilometers away. Cautiously, she set back down.

They passed coffee around. "It figures," said Carson. "We knew all along that the natives lived through these. Except, I guess, the urban populations." He looked hard at Hutch. "I think you're right. About Oz. When did you figure it out?"

"A few hours ago. I kept thinking how much Oz looked like a city. Who were they trying to fool?" She kissed Carson lightly on the cheek. "I wonder if they understood what these things really are? Where they come from?"

"I wonder," Angela said, "if this is the way organized religion got started." They all laughed.

More lightning. Closer.

"Maybe we should start paying attention to the storm," said Hutch.

Angela nodded. "It does seem to be walking this way, doesn't it?"

Another bolt glided to ground, illuminating the cockpit.

"I think it's seen us," Hutch said.

"Hey." Angela caught her shoulder. "Don't let your imagination get overloaded."

"It's only lightning out there," whispered Carson.

Angela, as a precaution, powered up.

"What kind of sensor range do we have?" asked Hutch.

"Zip. If we have to go, we'll be flying blind."

A long, liquid bolt flowed between land and sky. Hills and plain stood out in quick relief, and vanished. Thunder rolled across them. "It is coming this way," whispered Angela.

"I don't think we want to go up in this wind if we can avoid it," said Carson. He was about to add something, when another fireball appeared. It sliced across the sky. They watched it move through the dark, right to left, watched it stop and begin to brighten.

"Son of a bitch," squealed Angela. "It's turning toward us." Simultaneously, she pulled back the yoke, and the shuttle bucked into the air. The wind howled. The thing in the night burned, a blue-white star churning to nova.

"Button up," called Hutch, sliding into her harness and igniting the energy field. Carson scrambled for a handhold.

Hutch locked Angela down in her web seat, and sealed off cargo, where Carson was seated. Then she clipped on her own restraints.

"Frank?"

"I'm okay," he said. "Get us out of here."

Angela put the juice to the magnets, and the shuttle leaped forward, and up, and the light passed beneath them. They heard the subsequent roar and felt the shock wave, and came around in time to see a white geyser climbing skyward.

Hutch looked toward Angela. "Strange meteor."

She nodded. "I'd say so."

The wind dragged at them, blew them across the sky.

Angela was trying to ease back onto the surface when a thunderbolt exploded alongside and the night filled with light. Their electronics went down, and the vehicle lurched wildly. Smoke leaked into the cockpit.

Angela activated her fire-retardants, fought the shuttle into near-level flight, and started back up. "Safer upstairs," she said.

"No," said Carson. "Down. Take us down."

"Frank, we need to be able to maneuver. We're a sitting duck down there."

"Do it, Angela. Get us on the ground."

"You're crazy," said Hutch.

Angela looked distraught. "Why?"

Another bolt hammered them.

"Just do it," Carson said. "As quick as you can."

Hutch watched him on the monitor. He was pulling together the air tanks they'd stored.

Angela pushed the stick forward. "We should be trying to get above this," she protested.

"How do you get above meteorsT' demanded Carson.

Status lamps blinked off, came back on. Something exploded in back and a roar filled the vehicle. They began to fall.

"We're holed," cried Hutch.

Angela banked left and whacked the navigation console. "Portside rear stabilizers are gone," she said. Through the bedlam of escaping air, howling wind, raining rock and ice, she managed to comment coolly, "Looks like you'll get your way. We are sure as hell going down."

The sky was filled with lightning.

"Fifty meters," said Angela.

They jounced back onto the plain, throwing up gouts of snow and soot. Another meteor was tracking across the sky to their rear. They watched it pause and begin to brighten.

"Out," Carson cried.

Angela started to argue, but Hutch reached over and punched the air cyclers. "It's okay," she said.

They grabbed the tanks and dragged them out as soon as the hatch had opened. Hutch tumbled into the snow, got up, and kept going.

Carson was right behind her.

"Run," he cried. He had three tanks, lost one, but did not go back for it.

The fireball was coming in over a range of hills to the north.

They ran. The snow was crusted and kept breaking underfoot. Hutch went down again. Damn.

Hang onto the tanks!

"You sure he knows what he's doing?" Angela asked.

"Yes," said Hutch. "I think so. Go."

The women struggled to put distance between themselves and the shuttle. Carson stayed with them.

The meteor trailed fire. Pieces broke off and fell.

"Everybody down!" cried Carson. They threw themselves into the snow.

The fireball roared in and blasted the shuttle. Direct hit.

The ground buckled, the icescape brightened, and a hurricane of snow and earth rolled over them. Rocks and debris struck Hutch's energy field.

When it subsided, Carson switched on his lamp. They saw only a crater where the shuttle had been.

Angela shivered. She looked at the sky, and back at the lamp. "For God's sake," she said, "turn it off."

Carson complied. "If you like," he said. "But I think we'll be all right now."

She tried to bury herself in the snow, to hide from the clouds.

"It was never after us" said Carson.

"How can you say that?" Angela asked.

More lightning. "Right angles," he said. "It wanted the shuttle. Your flying box."

Over the next few hours, the electricity drained out of the heavens. They sat quietly, watching the storms clear off. "I think I understand why the Quraquat used the image of a Monument-Maker to portray Death," Frank said.

"Why?" asked Angela.

"Shoot the messenger. The Monument-Makers probably had no compunctions about landing, introducing themselves, and telling the Quraquat what the problem was." He smiled. "You know, Richard was right. There are no aliens. They all turn out to be pretty human."

"Like George," said Hutch.

Carson drew up his knees and wrapped his arms around them. "Yes," he said. He looked at Angela and explained: "They couldn't stop the goddam things, so they created a diversion. Made something else for them to attack."

"Well, something occurs to me" said Angela. "This thing" — she waved in the general direction of the sky—"was part of the wave that struck Beta Pac about 5000 B.C., Quraqua around 1000 B.C., and Nok in AD 400. More or less. Right?"

"Yes," said Carson.

"It's headed toward Earth." She looked unsettled.

Carson shrugged. "We've got nine thousand years to deal with it."

"You know," Hutch said, "Janet mentioned that we may already have had some direct experience with these things. She thinks the A wave correlates to Sodom."

Angela's eyes narrowed. "Sodom? Maybe." She fixed Carson with a tight smile. "But I'm not sure we've got as much time as you think. The B wave is still out there."

Hutch moved closer to her companions. The B wave, the wave that had struck Beta Pac in 13,000 B.C., and Quraqua four thousand years later, would be relatively close to Earth. "About a thousand years," she said.

"Well," said Carson, "whatever. Nine or one, I still think we've got plenty of time."

A shadow crossed Angela's face. "I suspect that's close to what the Monument-Makers said."

LIBRARY ENTRY

No successful probe of an Omega cloud in Sight has been made. Efforts to transmit signals through the objects have yielded no results as of this writing. (See Adrian Clement's excellent monograph, The Omega Puzzle, quoted in full in Appendix Hi, for a lucid discussion of the theoretical problems involved.)

The only attempts to take a manned vehicle beneath the outer layers were made 3 and 4 July, 2211, by Meg Campbell, on the Pasquarella. Campbell made consecutive descents to 80 meters and 630 meters. She failed to return from a third try.

A detailed analysis of the Omega clouds must apparently await the development of new technology.

— Janet Allegri, The Engines of God Hartley & Co., London (2213)

AFTERWORD

Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, NJ. April 2231.

To date, there are few substantive answers about the Monument-Makers. A vast ruin exists deep beneath the harbor city on Beta Pacifica III. It is known to be from the Cholois, or Monument-Maker, era. (The term means the Universal People, and it seems to have been used to include other intelligent species.) Excavation is proceeding with due caution. What is currently known is that Priscilla Hutchins' suggestion that a substantial number of the Cholois fled their home is correct. They planned, initiated, and may have completed, an intergalactic leap.

Surviving members of the species still exist on the home world. They are few, and have been reduced to a state of near-savagery. None have been found with any memory of their former greatness, save in their myths.

Recent investigations support the view that the inhabitants of the space station at Beta Pac III witnessed the destruction of their world by an Omega cloud, and chose to die in space rather than return to a devastated homeland. Investigation continues.

Attempts to inspect the Omega clouds (which were not named for Angela Morgan) have been uniformly unproductive. Strong electromagnetic fields are believed to contribute to the clouds' ability to retain their structure, but no one has explained satisfactorily how this could be.

They have turned out to be much less numerous than formerly supposed. It was something of an aberration that the Ashley Tee found two of them simultaneously in the same system. They are nevertheless uncomfortably plentiful, and there is no realistic hope that the solar system will not receive one or two unwelcome visitors in its own distant future.

Conferences have already been convened to plan a strategy, and to ensure that future generations are warned of the danger.

The central processing unit recovered by Maggie Tufu from the space station has been a trove of information about the so-called City-Builder era. The natives of that period were aware of their early exploits. But rather than serving as a source of pride, they provoked a sense of lost greatness and decay which slowed development, promoted decay, and induced dark ages.

The existence of the Omega clouds has raised deep-seated philosophical questions about the position of the human race in a universe now seen by many to be actively hostile. Return-to-nature movements have sprung up around the world, and there has also been a resurgence of fundamentalist religious groups, which had been in decline for decades.

Project Hope has proceeded successfully, and it now appears that the first human settlers will arrive on Quraqua well ahead of schedule.

Six additional monuments have been found. The Braker Society (named for its founder, Aran Braker, who died of a stroke during a demonstration outside the Smithsonian) has led a strong effort in recent years to recover the Great Monuments, and place them in Earth orbit. This effort has been encouraged by technological advances which would render the project feasible. Although the idea has found considerable popularity among the general public, opposition has come principally from the Academy and its allies, one of the more vocal of whom has been Melanie Truscott. These have been characterized as «Arconuts» by the Braker Society.

Starship design has improved significantly as a result of the experience of the Winckelmann. Secondary life support systems, capable of full manual operation, are now standard features.

Melanie Truscott's career went into eclipse for several years, owing to the Richard Wald incident. She came to the public's attention again in 2207 when she opposed an effort to resume massive logging in the Northwest. She lost that struggle, but was elected to the Senate in 2208.

lan Helm, who was Kosmik's director of southern icecap operations on Quraqua, escaped all blame for pushing the button. He has served several agencies and corporations in high-level posts, and is currently Commissioner of the NAU Park Service.

The Great Telescope in Beta Pacifica shares many of the characteristics of a living organism, although it is not quite precise to say it is alive. It was once fully capable of collecting data across the spectrum. Its signals have never been translated satisfactorily into optical images. It is now believed that the software, whose methodology is only dimly understood, has malfunctioned.

Henry Jacobi died in Chicago after a long illness. His last years were embittered by a series of simmy versions of the rescue at the Temple, all of which portrayed him as reckless and blundering.

Frank Carson never did take the job with the Academy's personnel division. And despite his resolution after the deaths of Maggie Tufu and George Hackett, he returned to Beta Pacifica III, where he headed the Working Group for six years. He received full credit for leading the original expedition, and ranks in his own lifetime with Champollion, Larimatsu, and Wald. He married Linda Thomas, from the Temple mission, and is now the father of two redheaded girls. He is also Chairman of the Margaret Tufu Foundation, which provides research grants and educational aid to budding mathematicians.

Tourists at the Academy in Washington, D.C., often visit the George Hackett wing of the main library. A striking photograph of Hackett, superimposed over a copy of the Casumel script which he helped rescue at Quraqua, dominates the west wall.

Maggie Tufu's brilliant account of the search for the meaning of the inscription at Oz, Philological Aspects of Casumel Linear, was published several years ago to unanimous acclaim. Edited by Janet Allegri, it is already recognized as a mathematical classic.

Allegri is now teaching at Oxford.

Priscilla Hutchins continues to pilot the Academy's ships. She has established a reputation of her own, and people meeting her for the first time are always surprised to discover that she is not quite as tall, or as beautiful, as they had expected. That comes later.

— David Emory