Time

Did you see it? It was on all the channels. Jesus Christ. If this is

real — Spike, think about the implications.

If Reid Malenfant’s light show from Bootstrap has any validity at all — and our experts here at the think tank, e and otherwise, have a consensus that it does — then the old arguments about mutually assured destruction, the nuclear winter and so forth, no longer apply. We know that no matter what we do today, the species will emerge strong and destined for a long and glo- riousfuture.

The only question is who will control that future.

We know, Spike, that our enemies are war-gaming this, just as we are. We’re already in a game of chicken; we’re in those two onrushing cars locked eyeball to eyeball with the other guy, and it’s a game we have to win.

Many of us think our best strategy right now is to throw out the steering wheel.

And that’s why we must consider a first strike.

I know this is a controversial view, Spike. But you have a seat on Marine One. If anybody has a chance to enact this, to press it on the president, it’s you.

Emma Stoney:

The image broke up into static, restabilized.

Emma felt bewildered. “Has the firefly gone through?”

“We lost a couple of systems,” Cornelius said. “Overloads. I think…”

Emma leaned forward. The screen was empty, dark… No, not quite. Something at the base. Broken ground, regolith, asteroid soil.

The firefly seemed to be rolling forward. A spot of ground directly in front of it was lit up by the small floodlights it carried. Farther out the ground was illuminated by a softer glow: not sunlight, or even starlight, she realized. The light seemed diffuse, as if from some extended source, a glowing ceiling somewhere out of her view.

There were no stars in the sky.

Suddenly a bright yellow light washed over the regolith, drowning the firefly’s feeble glow.

Emma was dazzled. “What’s that? Is something wrong?”

“No. I just turned on the floods. We can’t see into the portal, but we can fire light beams through from the other side.”

Malenfant said, “I think the firefly is panning the camera.”

The image crept sideways: empty sky, broken regolith in a wash of light.

“Shit,” Malenfant said. “It looks like Cruithne.”

“I think we are still on Cruithne. Or a version of Cruithne. The firefly has a gravimeter, and instruments to study the surface material. The data’s patchy. But the composition looks the same as Cruithne’s, at first glance. The gravity strength is actually a little down, however.”

“What does that mean?”

“Cruithne has lost a little mass.”

“How?”

Cornelius just glared.

A blue ring scanned slowly into the picture. Its interior was shining, bright, and yellow.

“The portal,” Cornelius said. “That light is our flood, shining through. In fact when the sun comes up on our side, the sunlight should reach the far side—”

“If this is Cruithne,” Malenfant said, “where the hell are we? The far side, the pole?”

“You don’t understand,” Cornelius whispered.

The firefly was moving its own small spotlights. The glowing ellipses swept across the regolith and fell on the portal.

Malenfant grabbed a softscreen and began flicking through camera angles. “If it is possible to get back through that portal—”

“We should be able to see the firefly’s glow, coming back through this side,” Cornelius said. “Good thinking.”

They found a stable external image of the portal from this side; the asteroid ground here was littered with instruments and fireflies. The portal stayed dark. Emma stared hard, hoping to see a twinkling glow, like a flashlight shone out of a dark pit. There was nothing.

Cornelius nodded, looking pleased.

“Damn it, Cornelius,” Emma snapped. “This means the Sheena won’t be able to get back. Doesn’t it?”

He seemed surprised by her anger. “But we knew that already. This just reinforces the hypothesis.”

“And that pleases you.”

“Of course it does.” He was puzzled.

Emma took a breath to calm herself.

“If the firefly’s light isn’t making it back,” Malenfant said, “how come its radio signal is?”

“I don’t think it is. I think the portal — the far end — is picking up the firefly’s transmissions and rebroadcasting them, maybe through some kind of Feynman radio. And I think the portal at our end is picking up the Feynman stuff, and transmitting it again as radio signals, which we can pick up.”

“Like Sheena’s initial screech.”

“Yes.”

“What kind of Feynman radio? Neutrinos?”

“There is a higher neutrino flux coming from the portal since we started this,” Cornelius said. “But I’m guessing. We’re dealing with capabilities far beyond our own.”

The firefly’s camera angle continued to scan across the asteroid’s horizon; the eerily glowing portal, standing alone, started to move out of the picture.

A crater came into the field of view: so vast and deep only its near rim, high and sharp, was visible.

“Look at that,” Malenfant said. “It must be a mile across. That isn’t on our Cruithne.”

“Not yet,” Cornelius murmured.

“Not yet? You think the Sheena has gone into the future? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Think about it. If there had been a crater like that on Cruithne in the past, what could have erased it?”

“How far in the future?”

“I’ve no way of telling,” Cornelius said. “There’s no sign of residual radioactivity from that crater. If it was caused by a nuclear weapon the detonation must have been ten, a hundred thousand years ago.”

“A hundred thousand years? “

“That’s a minimum. The maximum…” He checked another datum. “The firefly is carrying thermocouples. I programmed it to check the background radiation temperature of the universe. The cooling glow of the Big Bang… I can’t see a change within the tolerance of the equipment from the present value, three degrees above absolute.”

“What does that mean?”

“Hard to say. We’ve gone forward less than a billion years, perhaps.”

Emma said, “My God, Cornelius. You expected this. You were prepared to track giant jumps in time by measuring changes in the temperature of the universe?”

“I didn’t know what we would find. I didn’t want to rule out anything.”

“How can you think that way?”

He smiled slyly. “I’m an obsessive. You know me, Emma.” He tapped his forehead.

“There,” Malenfant said, pointing at the big softscreen. “The Sheena.”

The golden beach ball was sitting on the asteroid ground, under the black sky. And something was reflected in the golden meniscus: something above the frame of the image, up in the sky. Swirling light, washing across the gold.

A shadow swam within the beach ball.

“Can we speak to her?” Emma said.

“We can pass radio signals into the portal, like our floodlights. The Sheena should be able to pick them up.”

“And presumably she can speak to us, through the Feynman mechanism.”

“If she wants to.” Cornelius tapped his softscreen. “Just speak. The software will translate.”

“Sheena?” Malenfant said. “Sheena, can you hear me?”

They waited patiently through the time delay.

On the screen, the squid turned to look at the firefly. Cornelius’ software picked up a sign: simple, iconic.

Dan.

“Not Dan. Friends. Are you healthy?”

They waited out another long pause.

Reef.

Malenfant said tightly, “What in hell is she looking at? How can I ask her—”

“We can do better than that,” Cornelius said. He tapped his softscreen.

At Cornelius’ command, the firefly’s camera swiveled away from the beach ball and tipped up toward the sky, the way the Sheena was looking.

A ceiling of curdled light filled the camera’s frame.

“Shit,” Malenfant said. “No wonder there were no stars…”

Emma found herself staring at a Galaxy.

It was more complex than Emma had imagined. The familiar disc — shining core, spiral arms — was actually embedded in a broader, spherical mass of dim stars. The core, bulging out of the plane of the disc, was bigger than she had expected — a compact mass of yellowish light. Delicately blue spiral arms — she counted them, one, two, three, four — wrapped tightly around the core were much brighter than the core itself. She could see individual stars blazing there, a granularity, and dark lanes traced between each arm.

There was a surprising amount of structure, she thought, a lot of complexity; this Galaxy was quite evidently an organized system, not just some random mass of stars.

“So, a Galaxy,” Malenfant said. “Our Galaxy?”