EARTH.

After that, it was only a matter of minutes before somebody said, "We ought to try to go there."

Which was exactly-a hundred years and an enormous expenditure of global resources, time, knowledge, and determination later-what Aster's Hope was doing.

Naturally enough-people being what they were-there were quite a few men and women on Aster who didn't believe in the mission. And there was also a large number who did believe who still had enough common sense or native pessimism to be cautious. As a result, there was a large planet-wide debate while Aster's Hope was being planned and built. Some people insisted on saying things like, "What if it isn't Earth at all? What, if it's some alien planet where they don't know humanity from bat-dung and don't care?"

Or, "At this distance, your figures aren't accurate within ten pa.r.s.ecs. How do you propose to compensate for that?"

Or, "What if the ship encounters someone else along the way? Finding intelligent life might be even more important than finding Earth. Or they might not like having our ship wander into their s.p.a.ce. They might blow Aster's Hope to pieces-and then come looking for us."

Or, of course, "What if the ship gets all the way out there and doesn't find anything at all?"

Well, even the most avid proponent of the mission was able to admit that it would be unfortunate if Aster's Hope were to run a thousand lighthtyears across the galaxy and then fail. So the planning and preparation spent on designing the ship and selecting and training the crew was prodigious. But the Asterins didn't actually start to build their ship until they found an answer to what they considered the most fundamental question, about the mission.

On perhaps any other inhabited planet in the Galaxy, that question would have been the question of speed. A thousand lightyears was too far away. Some way of traveling faster than the speed of light was necessary. Bat the Asterins had a blind spot. They knew from legend that their ancestors had slept during a centuries-long, s.p.a.ce-normal voyage; and they were simply unable to think realistically about traveling in any other way. They learned, as Earth had millennia ago, that c was a theoretical absolute limit: they believed it and turned their attention in other directions.

No, the question which troubled them was safety. They wanted to be able to send out Aster's Hope certain that no pa.s.sing hostile, meteor shower, or accident of diplomacy would be able to destroy her.

So she wasn't built until a poorly-paid instructor at an obscure university suddenly managed to make sense out of a field of research that people had been laughing at for years: C-vector.

For people who hadn't done their homework in theoretical mathematics or abstract physics, "c-vector"

was defined as "at right angles to the speed of light." Which made no sense to anyone-but that didn't stop the Asterins from having fun with it. Before long, they discovered that they could build a generator to project a c-vector field.

If that field were projected around an object, it formed an impenetrable shield-a screen against which bullets and laser cannon and hydrogen torpedoes had no effect. (Any projectile or force which hit the shield bounced away "at right angles to the speed of light" and ceased to exist in material s.p.a.ce. When this was discovered, several scientists spent several years wondering if a c-vector field could somehow be used as a faster-than-light drive for a s.p.a.ceship. But no one was able to figure out just what direction "at right angles to the speed of light" was.) This appeared to have an obvious use as a weapon-project a field at an object, watch the object disappear-until the researchers learned that the field couldn't be projected either at or around any object unless the object and the field generator were stationary in relation to each other. But fortunately the c-vector field had an even more obvious application for the men and women who were planning Aster's Hope.

If the ship were equipped with c-vector shields, she would be safe from any disaster short of direct collision with a star. And if the ship were equipped with a c-vector self-destruct, Aster would be safe from any disaster which might happen to-or be caused by-the crew of Aster's Hope.

Construction on the ship commenced almost immediately.

And eventually it was finished. The linguists and biologists and physicists were trained. The meditechs and librarians were equipped. The diplomats were instructed. Each of the nician and puter teams knew how to take Aster's Hope down to her microchips and rebuild (not to mention repro) her from spare parts.

Leaving orbit, setting course, building up speed, the ship arced past Philomel and Periwinkle on her way into the galactic void of the future. For the Asterins, it was as if legends had come back to life-as if a dream crouching in the human psyche since before the Crash had stood up and become real.

But six months later, roughly .4 lightyears from Aster, Temple and Gracias weren't thinking about legends. They didn't see themselves as protectors of a dream. When the emergency brapper went off, they did what any dedicated, well-trained, and quick-thinking Service personnel would have done: they panicked.

But while they panicked they ran naked as children in the direction of the nearest auxcompcom.

In crude terms, the difference between nician and puter was the difference between hardware and software-although there was quite a bit of overlap, of course. Temple made equipment work: Gracias told it what to do. It would've taken her hours to figure out how to do what he'd done to the door sensors. But when they heard the brapper and rolled off the pallet with her ahead of him and headed out of the capsule chamber, and the door didn't open, he was the one who froze.

"d.a.m.n," he muttered, "That repro won't cancel for another twenty minutes."

He looked like he was thinking something abusive about himself, so she snapped at him, "Hold it open for me, idiot."

He thudded a palm against his forehead. "Right."

Practically jumping into range of the sensor, he got the door open; and she pa.s.sed him on his way out into the corridor. But she had to wait for him again at the auxcompcom door. "Come on. Come on," she fretted. "Whatever that brapper means, it isn't good."

"I know." Leftover sweat made his face slick, gave him a look of too much fear. Grimly, he pushed through the sensor field into the auxcompcom room and headed for his chair at the main com console.

Temple followed, jumped into her seat in front of her hardware controls. But for a few seconds neither of them looked at their b.u.t.tons and readouts. They were fixed on the main screen above the consoles.

The ship's automatic scanners were showing a blip against the deep background of the stars. Even at this distance, Temple and Gracias didn't need the comp to tell them the dot of light on the phosphors of the screen was moving. They could see it by watching the stars recede as the scanners focused in on the blip.

It was coming toward them.

It was coming fast.

"An asteroid?" Temple asked, mostly to hear somebody say something. The comp was supposed to put Aster's Hope on emergency alert whenever it sensed a danger of collision with any object large enough to be significant.

"Oh, sure." Gracias poked his blunt fingers around his board, punching readouts up onto the other auxcompcom screens. Numbers and schematics flashed. "If asteroids change course."

"Change-?"

"Just did an adjustment," he confirmed. "Coming right at us. Also,"-he pointed at a screen to her left-"decelerating."

She stared at the screen, watched the numbers jump. Numbers were his department; he was faster at them than she was. But she knew what words meant. "Then it's a ship."

Gracias acted like he hadn't heard her. He was watching the screens as if he were close to apoplexy.

"That doesn't make sense," she went on. "If there are ships this close to Aster, why haven't we heard from them? We should've picked up their transmissions. They should've heard us. G.o.d knows we've been broadcasting enough noise for the past couple of centuries. Are we hailing it?"

"We're hailing," he said. "No answer." He paused for a second, then announced, "Estimated about three times our size." He sounded stunned. Carefully, he said, "The comp estimates it's decelerating from above the speed of light."

She couldn't help herself. "That's impossible," she snapped. "Your eyes are tricking you. Check it again."

He hit some more b.u.t.tons, and the numbers on the screen twisted themselves into an extrapolation graph. Whatever it was, the oncoming ship was still moving faster than Aster's Hope-and it was still decelerating.

For a second, she put her hands over her face, squeezed the heels of her palms against her temples. Her pulse felt like she was going into adrenaline overload. But this was what she'd been trained for. Abruptly, she dropped her arms and looked at the screens again. The blip was. still coming, but the graph hadn't changed.

From above the speed of light. Even though the best Asterin scientists had always said that was impossible.

Oh, well, she muttered to herself. One more law of nature down the tubes. Easy come, easy go.

"Why don't they contact us?" she asked. "If we're aware of them, they must know we're here."

"Don't need to," Gracias replied through his concentration. "Been scanning us since they hit s.p.a.ce normal speed. The comp reports scanner probes everywhere. Strong enough to take your blood pressure." Then he stiffened, sat up straighter, spat a curse. "Probes are trying to break into the comp."

Temple gripped the arms of her seat. This was his department; she was helpless. "Can they do it? Can you stop them?"

"Encryption's holding them out." He studied his readouts, flicked his eyes past the screens. "Won't last.

Take com."

Without waiting for an answer, he keyed his console to hers and got out of his seat. Quickly, he went to the other main console in the room, the comp repro board.

Feeling clumsy now as she never did when she was working with tools or hardware, she accepted com and began trying to monitor the readouts. But the numbers swam, and the prompts didn't seem to make sense. Operating in emergency mode, the comp kept asking her to ask it questions; but she couldn't think of any for it. Instead, she asked Gracias, "What're you doing?"

His hands stabbed up and down the console. He was still sweating. "Changing the encryption," he said.

"Whole series of changes. Putting them on a loop." When he was done, he took a minute to doublecheck his repro. Then he gave a grunt of satisfaction and came back to his com seat. While he keyed his controls away from Temple, he said, "This way, the comp can't be broken by knowing the present code.

Have to know what code's coming up next. That loop changes often enough to keep us safe for a while."

She permitted herself a sigh of relief-and a soft snarl of anger at the oncoming ship. She didn't like feeling helpless. "If those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds can't break the comp, do you think they'll try to contact us?"

He shrugged, glanced at his board. "Channels are open. They talk, we'll hear." For a second, he chewed his lower lip. Then he leaned back in his seat and swung around to face her. His eyes were dark with fear.

"Don't like this," he said distinctly, "Don't like it at all. A faster-than-light ship coming straight for us.

Straight for Aster. And they don't talk. Instead, they try to break the comp."

She knew his fear. She was afraid herself. But when he looked like he needed her, she put her own feelings aside. "Would you say," she said, drawling so she would sound sardonic and calm, "that we're being approached by somebody hostile?"

He nodded dumbly.

"Well, we're safe enough. Maybe the speed of light isn't unbreakable, but a c-vector shield is. So what we have to worry about is Aster. If that ship gets past us, we'll never catch up with it. How far away is it now?"

Gracias turned back to his console, called up some numbers. "Five minutes." His face didn't show it, but she could hear in his voice that he was grateful for her show of steadiness.

"I don't think we should wait to see what happens," she said. "We should send a message home now."

"Right." He went to work immediately, composing data on the screens, calling up the scant history of Aster's Hope's contact with the approaching ship. "Continuous broadcast," he murmured as he piped information to the transmitters. "Constant update, Let Aster know everything we can."

Temple nodded her approval, then gaped in astonishment as the screens broke up into electronic garbage. A sound like frying circuitry spat from all the speakers at once-from the hailing channels as well as from intraship. She almost let out a shout of surprise; but training and recognition bit it back. She knew what that was.

"Jammer," Gracias said. "We're being jammed."

"From this distance?" she demanded. "From this distance? That kind of signal should take"-she checked her readout-"three and some fraction minutes to get here. How do they do that?"

He didn't reply for a few seconds: he was busy restoring order to the screens. Then he said, "They've got faster-than-light drive. Scanners make ours look like toys. Why not better radio?"

"Or maybe," she put in harshly, "they started broadcasting their jammer as soon as they picked us up." In spite of her determination to be calm, she was breathing hard, sucking uncertainty and anger through her teeth. "Can you break through?"

He tried, then shook his head. "Too thick."

"d.a.m.n! Gracias, what're we going to do? If we can't warn Aster, then it's up to us. If that ship is hostile, we've got to fight it somehow."

"Not built for it," he commented. "Aster's Hope. About as maneuverable as a rock."

She knew. Everything about the ship had been planned with defense rather than offense in mind. She was intended, first, to survive; second, not to give anything away about her homeworld prematurely. In fact as well as in appearance, she wasn't meant as a weapon of war. And one reason for this was that the mission planners had never once considered the idea of encountering an alien (never mind hostile) ship this close to home.

She found herself wishing for different armament, more speed, and a whole lot less ma.s.s. But that couldn't be helped now. "We need to get their attention somehow," she said, "Make them cope with us before they go on," An idea struck her, "What've the scanners got on them?''

"Still not much. Size, Velocity." Then, as if by intuition, he seemed to know what she had in mind, "Shields of course. Look like ordinary force-disruption fields."

She almost smiled. "'You're kidding. No c-vector?"

"Nope."

"Then maybe-" She thought furiously. "Maybe there's something we can do. If we can slow them down-maybe do them some damage-and they can't hurt us at all-maybe they won't go on to Aster.

"Gracias, are we on a collision course with that thing?"

He glanced, at her. "Not quite. Going to miss by a kilometer."

As if she were in command of Aster's Hope, she said, "Put us in the way."

A grin flashed through his concentration. "Yes, sir, Temple, ma'am, sir. Good idea."

At once, he started keying instructions into his com board.

While he set up the comp to adjust Aster's Hope's course- and then to adjust it continuously to keep the ship as squarely as possible in the oncoming vessel's path-Temple secured herself in her momentum restraints. Less than three minutes, she thought. Three minutes to impact. For a moment, she thought Gracias was moving too slowly. But before she could say anything, he took his hands off the board and started strapping his own restraints. "Twenty seconds," he said.

She braced herself. "Are we going to feel it?"

"Inertial shift? Of course."

"No, idiot. Are we going to feel the impact?"

He shrugged. "If we hit. n.o.body's ever hit a c-vector shield that hard with something that big."

Then Temple's stomach turned on its side, and the whole auxcompcom felt like it was starting into a spin.

The course adjustment was over almost immediately: at the speeds Aster's Hope and the alien were traveling, one kilometer was a subtle shift.

Less than two and a half minutes. If we hit. She couldn't sit there and wait for it in silence. "Are the scanners doing any better? We ought to be able to count their teeth from this range."

"Checking," he said. With a few b.u.t.tons, he called a new display up onto the main screen- -and stared at it without saying anything. His mouth hung open; his whole face was blank with astonishment.

"Gracias?" She looked at the screen for herself. With a mental effort, she tightened down the screws on her brain, forced herself to see the pattern in the numbers. Then she lost control of her voice: it went up like a yell. "Gracias?"

"Don't believe it," he murmured. "No. Don't believe it."

According to the scanners, the oncoming ship was crammed to the walls with computers and weaponry, equipment in every size and shape, mechanical and electrical energy of all kinds-and not one single living organism.

"There's nothing-" She tried to say it, but at first she couldn't. Her throat shut down, and she couldn't unlock it. She had to force a swallow past the rigid muscles. "There's nothing alive in that ship.''

Abruptly, Aster's Hope went into a course shift that felt like if was going to pull her heart out of her chest. The alien was taking evasive action, and Aster's Hope was compensating.

One minute.

"That's crazy," She was almost shouting. "It comes in faster than light and starts decelerating right at us and jams oar transmissions and shifts course to try to keep us from running into it-and there's n.o.body alive on board? Who do we talk to if we want to surrender?"