"In time I will," Dykstra said. "But you're right, Sammi. I'm asking all of you to commit what will be called treason by some if things turn out badly. It's not by convincing you of the logic of my view about the Phinons that's going to get you to agree to do this. After all, I might be wrong. It's . . ." he stammered, unsure of what to say next.

This is hard for him, Sammi thought. He's used to explaining everything in full. And he's too kind to say we won't understand his explanation. He doesn't know how to ask us if we'll just do it out of faith. She made it easy on him. "I'm with you, Chris. Just tell me what you want me to do. You told me about Steve even when it could have gotten you sent back to Earth in disgrace. I owe you."

"I was there when you faced down the major," Rick said. "I've seen what you can do. I'm in."

"Me, too," Bob said. "I don't think I owe you anything, and I'm not bright enough to appreciate your intelligence. But you're a rarity in another way, Chris. You're a genuinely good man. I've met very few."

"Thank you, my friends," Dykstra said. "But there is one voice we have yet to hear from. Dr. Hague?"

Hague was still at the autochef. He was lying on his back on the counter, surrounded by a dozen glasses of hot chocolate, which ran the range of color from a nearly black, high concentration chocolate, to an almost white, fifty-fifty marshmallow/chocolate mix. He had the cover off the guts of the machine and was tinkering with it. The others had noticed what he was doing earlier, but they'd long ago learned to let Hague be Hague.

At Dykstra's call he stopped his work momentarily, looked at them all, and without a redundancy of phrase or a surplus yes, said, "You are my friends. I'm in, too." In that instant Sammi thought he looked solemn, thought she caught a glimpse of the Arie Hague that could have been had he not been caged by the cross-circuitry of autism. Then his ready smile returned and he gleefully turned back to the autochef.

Sammi was the last to leave. Dykstra had told her he had a few additional things to discuss.

"Once the others leave in the ship, Dr. Hague and I will return to the Moon. But while we're gone, there's something I'd like you to see if you can work on. We'll probably need a way to keep a Phinon unconscious if we're to bring any back alive."

"That shouldn't be a problem, Chris. Have you been keeping up with the biological work?" He shook his head no. "Well, they've figured out where the brain is. It's distributed throughout the body. Little knots of brain tissue are locked away inside cavities in the bones, and they're all tied together by specialized nerve cells. But apart from the odd geometry, the brain material itself isn't much different from terrestrial types."

"I see. So you think we may already have a serviceable knockout drop?"

"Promenidepromaine. PMDP. The stuff will put out anything from an elephant to a jellyfish. My guess is it will work on Phinons, too, but I'm going to have to think over what the dosage should be. I'll have to tell you about that later somehow-some way that we won't be found out."

"That problem is solved. Lieutenant Nachtegall will visit periodically. You can convey your findings to me through him."

"Okay," Sammi said. But she wasn't ready to leave yet. "I have something else I want to ask you."

Dykstra looked at her, seemed to be looking into her, and said: "I expected you would."

"Why?"

"You remind me of someone. Her name was Jenny. She would have had some things to ask me, too."

Sammi smiled at that. "Do you know what the question is?"

"I'm not that good," Dykstra said, smiling.

"Did you really worry that any of us wouldn't go along with you?" Sammi asked.

"It's a big risk," Dykstra replied. "The Patrol will come down hard on us if they find out what we're going to do. Our only hope of avoiding jail time or perhaps even execution is if the men return with something valuable. I would understand if someone didn't want to go along with that."

"But you knew all of us would, didn't you? We all gave you our reasons, I know, but you really don't think that's the whole of it, do you?"

"No." This time he looked at her with soft and approving eyes. "You and the others are feeling something, and I feel it, too."

"Is it supposed to include feeling that Steve died when he was supposed to?" Sammi asked, and a tear rolled down her cheek. She didn't wait for an answer. "As much as I loved Steve, as much as I miss him terribly, I . . . I . . . can't get the thought out of my head that his death . . . that in some way it was important to the Universe that he die exactly when he did."

Dykstra put an arm around her shoulder. "I understand," he said. "Christians are fond of saying that no matter what happens, somehow it's in God's plan. We just don't expect it to seem obvious to us.

"Yes, Sunshine, Steve died exactly when he was supposed to. And right now, you, and the others, and I are all feeling that we're at a turning point. That the world we knew is soon going to be replaced with another. And more. We are all feeling that we are the ones playing the pivotal roles."

"I feel like I'm being dragged in," Sammi said. "Against my will. I don't want the fate of the world to rest with me."

"Nor I," Dykstra said. "But would you rather it rested with someone else? A long time ago a country called the Soviet Union fell apart practically overnight. When many of the leaders gathered together to see what they could make out of the pieces, an archbishop admonished them to be wise, because what they were about to do would be remembered before God and history.

"It is the same with us."

Though it had still been morning when the ship left the System Patrol High Command on Luna, the sun was near setting over Lake Michigan as the sleek military courier boat sliced through the high clouds on its way to a landing at West Michigan Spaceport. It killed its speed over a landing pad, then gently drifted down on repulsors.

Dykstra came out first, waving his characteristic cane in front of him. He stood up straight at the bottom of the step and took in his surroundings. He looked up at the sky which was pale blue and sporting archipelagoes of clouds. "My boyhood home. It's been a long time."

Rick stepped out of the boat, only backwards. He was trying to coax Hague along. "C'mon, Arie. Trust me. You don't need a helmet."

In the door of the boat appeared the short, pudgy figure of Dr. Hague. The little man looked out, tentative, unsure. He looked from side to side to side, took a sniff, waved his hand through the air as if convincing himself that it really wasn't vacuum. Then a broad smile broke across his face like a wave impacting the shore and he gleefully hopped down the two steps to the ground.

"Yes, yes, Earth, Earth. Yes, Earth! Blue skies! Oh yes. Trees." Something caught his eye and he followed it as it swooped slowly past, close to him then up and over the courier ship. It was one of the sea gulls so prevalent around the inland seas of Michigan. "A bird! Oh, yes! A bird! How does it work?"

"It's alive, Arie," said Lieutenant Nachtegall, finally debarking himself. Hague seemed about to pursue his studies of Earth immediately, but Rick caught him by the arm and the three came over to join Dykstra.

"Smell the air, Chris," Rick said. "Brings back memories, eh? I used to camp out on the beach not five miles from here."

"P.J. Hofmaster State Park?" Dykstra asked.

"Of course!" Rick said, laughing.

"You guys can compare notes on the way to the black docks," Nachtegall said. "I think that's our transportation coming."

The ground car drove up and they set out for the Capitol Products building, under which was the subway system that would take them to the shipyard.

There was a sense of rightness about it all, Dykstra thought. He looked at his fellow travelers. These were the right players; they were on the right stage.

He watched the sun set like the curtain at the end of act one.

III.

Pops had flown better spaceships than this one. He had just turned 73, and for more than 50 of those years he had been a pilot for the System Patrol. He'd begun flying during the Belt War of Independence, first in the small Mosquito-class fighters, then up to Balrog-class bombers.

Most recently during the current war with the Belt, he'd been jockeying top-of-the-line Capitol Products streakbombers. The ship he was now in was also of Capitol Products manufacture, but it had come out of the civilian shipyards, for the Patricia was a freighter. Two short, thick cylinders tied together with struts and open framework, a cockpit in the front and a fusion motor in the back: she was a sturdy, solid performer.

Paula Eriksen came up front from her sleeping cubicle. "Where are we, Pops?" she said around a yawn.

Pops confirmed their position from the console. "We're just over a billion klicks out from Fort Conger Station, which means we should hear from them anytime now about beginning the tests. How was your beauty sleep?"

"If you weren't such a harmless old man, I'd hit you for a comment like that," Paula said. "But I slept just fine, thank you very much."

Pops laughed.

It was funny, Pops thought, how events so outside your own life have such immediate effects. For years people had speculated about how changed the world would be once alien intelligences were contacted, had proclaimed the massive paradigm shift to how humans thought of themselves that the discovery would engender.

But seldom did anyone focus on how the monumental discovery would affect individuals in anything but the most general way. For Pops never would have thought that the discovery of the aliens would lead to his being in a freighter with a stunning civilian propulsion tech nine astronomical units outside of the Hague Limit.

A light started blinking on the control board. "That's our message incoming," Pops said. The message was not visual or audio. It had come over tight laser beam, encrypted, and when the communication computer displayed the decoded message, it said exactly what Pops had been told it would: Position confirmed. Commence test at 1400.

"Kind of a blah message considering what it is we're about to test," Paula said.

"Blah it may be, but the test starts in thirty minutes. I'd better get into my power suit and down into the cargo bay," Pops replied.

Pops went into the back section and the closet-sized cubicle that was his room. He stripped, revealing a tough, wiry body that called into question his chronological age. Quickly he climbed into his power suit, checked all the monitors, kicked in the full juice to the power servos, and set out for the cargo bay. For this mission, his suit weaponry had been removed. He felt naked without it.

The airlock cycled and Pops walked into the cavern, lit only by a row of lights along each wall. The bay was under vacuum since it was easier to keep the cargo clean that way. No one wanted this experiment fussed up by any stray dust particles, not that such was likely. The cargo hold was empty except for two pallets that sat in the middle of the floor, held there gently by the one-tenth g field that was typical for this class of freighter. On the port side pallet was a collection of boxes and cylinders running tentacles of wire and optical fibers up to a dozen places on the hull. Those wires were attached to tracking and monitoring devices attached outside the ship for this unique mission.

The other pallet held the experiment itself. It looked something like a coffin with two cylinders, each attached by its own boom, projecting from the end. Pops knew that inside the "coffin" was a first-rate minifusion generator and no shortage of mysterious scientific gadgetry. And Dykstra's crowning achievement, too.

"Ten more minutes, Pops," Paula said over the comm. "I'm opening the bay doors. Go ahead and push our baby out."

The doors above him slowly slid apart revealing a nicely framed sea of stars with a ribbon of Milky Way splitting it diagonally. Pops recalled a time when an experiment of this magnitude would have demanded the construction of a million-credit device to move the experiment the ten meters from the floor of the cargo bay out through the door. Fortunately, he was living in a time when a man in a power suit was recognized for his worth.

Pops gently lifted the box off the pallet. It massed over 2,000 kilos, an appreciable weight even in a tenth of a gravity. Taking aim, Pops jumped, and the leg servos provided all the thrust necessary to take him and his burden through the doors. He had sailed a hundred meters out from the Patricia when he let go of the box and stopped himself with the suit jets. "I'm clear, Paula. How much time now?"

"Five minutes. You'd better get inside if you want to watch."

"Why inside? I think I'll just watch it from out here."

"Suit yourself," Paula replied. "Now shut up while I orient the thing." Pops saw little jets fire briefly on the corners of the box. Paula was lining up the experiment's momentum vector so that it was pointing radially away from the sun. Pops' jump from the ship had been pretty much in the right direction to begin with, but Paula was laying it into just the right groove.

Pops took his eyes off the box even as it continued its lazy journey away and looked around him at the endless night. The notion of alien beings "out there" had long ago been discredited, though he knew that in the past there had been periods when their eventual discovery was thought to be a certainty. But the Universe didn't seem to care much about human notions, and so while the "we are alone" paradigm reigned in exobiological circles, aliens, hostile ones, showed up.

They were out there now, in the Oort cloud. Waiting.

When the Patricia had left Fort Conger Station-itself already 59 A.U. from the sun-Pops had piloted the ship for several days to put another billion kilometers behind her. They were out there to test the first human FTL drive, and it wasn't known if the aliens would be able to find out what they were doing or not. For all anyone knew, turning on the drive might be like setting off a flare to some alien sensor array. It was possible that those aliens would come seeking the source of the test. Hopefully, they wouldn't find Fort Conger Station, not with her a billion klicks sunward, but they'd almost certainly find the Patricia.

Pops knew what would happen then. He was at Slingshot when their raid had hit there, had lost friends, and had seen a hero made. But there would be no heroics from his ship-the Patricia was unarmed. No, at the first sign of the aliens, Pops was under orders to issue a single command to the ship's computer, and it would set off the warhead hidden under the deck plates of the cargo bay.

Paula didn't know about that. Pops hoped she wouldn't have to find out.

"Thirty seconds, old man, to the sublight test," Paula said. "Can you even still see the box? It's already over three hundred meters away."

"Military power suits have image enhancers and magnification, Paula. I thought you knew that?"

"Well, excuse me," she said. Then: "On my mark. Five, four, three, two, one . . . There she goes!"

"Wow! A hundred gravities. And not a hint of exhaust." As Dykstra had foreseen, as his and Hague's tinkering had produced, the experimental drive twisted and contorted, thinned and thickened space-time in such a way that the coffin box fled the sun at 100 gees. After a few moments, Pops said, "It's out of sight, now. I'm coming aboard to watch the hyperflight test."

"Roger, Roger," Paula said. Pops winced-she'd used that joke about ten times too often already, and he'd probably heard it a million times in his career. As he headed back, Paula kept him informed. "Telemetry looks good. We're getting all the data, and everything seems to be within the expectation values. This friend of yours Dykstra really knows his stuff." Pops had gotten to know the legendary Dr. Dykstra briefly on the Moon, when he'd brought in the alien hyperdrive motor from Slingshot. Briefly, but not too briefly that the man hadn't felt free to ask him for a very important favor.

A favor that he would soon know whether or not he'd be honoring.

Pops reentered the ship through the cargo bay doors, and jetted to the airlock rather than waiting to hit the floor and walking. He was out of the lock, out of his power suit, and back in the cockpit in less than three minutes.

"You didn't waste any time," Paula said. "I didn't think an old man could move that fast."

"That's probably not the only time you didn't think," Pops retorted.

Paula chewed that over, muttered, "Touche," and returned her attention to the monitors. "One hundred seconds to hyperflight. Give me just a second and-" Her fingers danced across the control board. On the center viewscreen the image expanded immensely, and right in the center they could see the box.

"There. Got it. We rigged a feed in from the optical recorders on the instrument pallet right into the cockpit. Now we can watch."

In seconds, history would be made. Or not. Pops had personally witnessed several now famous historical moments in his long career, but he'd never been able to wait for one with a countdown.

The optical trackers kept the image centered and continuously adjusted magnification to keep the box a constant size. One second before zero the space behind the box began to shimmer, a milky ring of mirage stuff formed, and then with a blinding blue-white streak the box whipped away at 200 million gravities.

"Holy smoke!" Paula exclaimed.

"So far, so good," Pops said, but he was every bit as impressed. "Quick-how long has it been?"

"That's ten seconds right . . . now. It should be back in normal space and transmitting."

It had been planned for the probe to remain in hyperspace for ten seconds, then drop out and activate a homing beacon. The instruments on the Patricia were looking for that signal now. Dykstra had calculated the velocity the box should have attained in hyperspace. As soon as the signal arrived, they'd have experimental confirmation.

While Paula remained intent on the monitors, Pops turned his attention to the ship's own scanners. He had no idea if the aliens would show up, but he was ready just in case. The destruct code phrase echoed through his head. He prayed he wouldn't have to use it.

Just a tad over four minutes from when the box went hyper, the beacon signal was acquired. "That's bang on," Paula said. "The box was moving at twenty-four times the speed of light!" Other data poured in during the next hour as the box continued to test the Dykstra-Hague hyperdrive-data on energy use, stresses in the engine, Dykstra field instabilities. The box returned to the ship finally, and Pops went out again to bring it inside and return it to the pallet.

There was no sign of the aliens.

This time, Pops thought.

Sammi had spent the previous evening at her apartment in Luna City. It had been the first time she was home since going to work for the System Patrol, and she'd had to look up some of her old friends. Though she'd loved being able to turn down the gravity in her apartment, and finally sleep in low g again, she had not intended to stay there last night. But she had gotten in late from her friend Martha's and had not felt like taking the military shuttle back to the High Command so late.

Once the shuttle arrived at the base, Sammi didn't bother going to her room since she was as ready as ever for work. She headed straight for her lab.

She walked in and was greeted with, "Well, you're back, Sunshine. I couldn't find you yesterday. I was afraid I was going to miss you this trip."

"Oh, Bob. Hi. If I'd known you were going to come by I wouldn't have taken the day off."