'Good God,' I said. 'What, is it leaking?' And if so, how come we still exist?

'It is not physically leaking. It is in some way disappearing, though.' It made a rare humming sound, that meant it was thinking. It thought so fast it could solve most problems between phonemes.

'I can say with certainty that it is not leaking. If it were, the antiprotons would be receding from us at one gee. I sprayed water back along our path, and there was no reaction.'

I didn't know whether that was good or bad. 'Have you sent a message to Middle Finger?'

'Yes. But if it continues at this rate, the antimatter will be gone long before they receive it.'

Of course; we were more than four light-days away. 'Charge up every fuel cell to the maximum.'

'I did that as we were speaking.'

'How long...' Marygay said, 'how long can we last on auxiliary power?'

'About five days, at the normal rate of consumption. Several weeks, if we close off most life support and confine everybody to one floor.' 'We're still losing it?'

'Yes. The rate of loss appears to be increasing. If this, continues, we will be out of fuel in twenty-eight minutes.'

'Should we sound the general alarm?' I asked Marygay.

'Not yet. We have enough to worry about.'

'Ship, do you have any idea where the fuel could be going; whether we could get it back?'

'No. Nothing consistent with physics as I know it. There is an analogy in the Rhomer model for transient-barrier virtual particle substitution, but it has never been demonstrated.' I'd have to look that up sometime.

'Wait!' Marygay said. 'The escape ships. Is their antimatter evaporating, too?'

'Not yet. But it is not transferable.'

'I'm not thinking about transferring it,' she said to me. 'I'm thinking about getting the hell out of here before something worse happens.'

'Very sensible,' the ship said.

We put on robes and hurried down to the first floor. From the viewing port we could see the antimatter sphere as it shrank. It otherwise didn't look any different, a ball of blue sparkles, but it did grow smaller and smaller. Finally, it blinked out.

Acceleration stopped and the automatic zero gee cables unreeled, with a soft regular chiming, loud enough to wake most of the people. We could hear a few louder bells from some residences.

We'd done zero gee drill five times, twice unannounced, so it was not a big deal, yet. People floated out of their homes in various states of undress and started monkey-climbing to the common floor's assembly area.

Eloi Casi, the sculptor, was fully dressed, with a work apron covered with wood shavings. 'Damned silly time to pull a drill, Mandella. I'm trying to work.'

'Wish it was a drill, Eloi.' We drifted past him.

'What?'

'No power. No antimatter. No choices.'

Those six words were about all we could tell the company assembled, with the ship adding numbers and times.

'We might as well zip up in the escape ships and get the hell out of here,' Marygay said. 'Every second we delay, it's another twenty-four thousand kilometers we have to make up.'

'We're going eight percent of the speed of light,' I said. 'The escape ships have a slow steady thrust of 7.6 centimeters per second, squared. It will take us ten years to slow down to zero, and another fourteen to get back to MF.'

'Why do we have to rush it?' Alysa Bertram said. 'That antimatter might come back as mysteriously as it disappeared.'

'Yeah, suppose it does?' Stephen Funk said, coming to my elbow. 'Do you want to rely on it then? What if it went fine for another couple of months and then disappeared for good? You want to risk ten thousand years in suspended animation?'

Antres 906 had entered, and was floating just inside the door. I looked its way and it bobbed its head: Who knows?

'I agree with Steve,' I said. 'Show of hands? How many want to zip up and leave?'

Slightly more than half the hands went up. 'Wait a minute here,' Teresa Larson said. 'I haven't had my god-damned coffee yet, and you want me to decide whether to give all this up and go flinging into space?'

Nobody had put more work into revitalizing the ship. 'I'm sorry, Teresa. But I watched the stuff disappear, and I don't see any alternative.'

'Maybe it's our faith being tested, William. Though you wouldn't know anything about that.'

'No, I wouldn't. But I don't think the antimatter's going to come back just because we really, sincerely want it to.'

'Those escape ships are death traps,' Eloy Macabee whined. 'How many people die in SA, one out of three? Four?'

'Suspended animation has a survival rate of over eighty percent,' I said. 'The survival rate here aboard ship is going to be zero.'

Diana had come up to float beside me. 'The less time we spend in SA, the more likely we are to survive. Teresa, you have your cup of coffee. But then come down and get in line. I'm going to prep people as quickly as possible.'

'We aren't accelerating anymore,' Ami Larson said. 'We can afford to wait and think things' over.'

'Okay you hang around and think,' Diana said heatedly. 'I want out of here before something else happens. Like the air disappearing, next you want to think that one over, Ami? You want to tell me it couldn't happen?'

'If people do want to stay till the last minute,' I said, 'you can't expect Diana to wait along with you.'

'They can prep themselves, without a doctor or nurse,' she said. 'But if anything goes wrong, they just die.'

'In their sleep,' Teresa said.

'I don't know. Maybe you wake up long enough to strangle. Nobody's ever come back to report.'

Marygay stepped into the moment of hostile silence. She had a clipboard. 'I want names of people willing to leave on the first and second ships. That's sixty people. You can take at most three kilograms of personal items. First group, show up at ten o'clock.'

To Diana: 'How long does it take to prepare?'

'The purging part is like lightning. You want to be sitting on a toilet when you take the medicine.' Some people laughed nervously. 'Seriously. Then it takes maybe five minutes to hook up the orthotics. Those of us who did high-gee combat used to do it in under a minute. But we're out of practice.'

'And a little older now. So figure the second group at noon?'

'That's reasonable. Nobody eat anything between now and then, and don't drink anything but water. Don't take any medicine unless you clear it with me.'

The clipboard started around. 'Once I get these sixty names,' Marygay said, 'the ones who've signed up can go. Then we'll start filling ships Three and Four. How many people are dead set against going?' Twenty people raised hands, some tentatively. I think Paul Greyton and Elena Monet did it out of fear of going against their spouses. Or maybe reluctance to leave them. 'Come over here with me and William, to the coffee station.'

No more coffee from this gravity-fed machine, ever again. That was a plus.

Marygay kissed for the ship. 'What chance do these people have for survival?'

'I can't calculate that, Captain. I don't know where the antimatter went, so I don't know what the probability is that it might reappear.'

'How long will they live if it stays missing?'

'If the twenty people stayed in this one room, and kept it insulated, they could live for many years. My water will begin to freeze in a few weeks, though, and one person will have to go out to the pool and mine it.

'But the pool has enough water for ten years, if you only drink it, and don't wash.

'Food is the complicating factor. Before the first year is over, you'll have to resort to cannibalism. Of course, with each person harvested, there is one less person to feed, and the average body should yield about three hundred meals. So the final survivor will have lived one thousand sixty-four days after the first one is killed, assuming he or she stays warm.'

Marygay was silent for a moment, smiling. 'Think it over.' She kicked off from the table and floated toward the door. I followed, less gracefully.

There was a private command line outside the cafeteria door. I picked up the handset, and said, 'Ship, do you have a sense of humor?'

'Only in that I can distinguish between incongruous situations and sensible ones. That was incongruous.'

'What are you going to do when everyone is gone?'

'I have no choice but to wait.'

'For what?'

'For the return of the antimatter.'

'You actually think it will come back?'

'I didn't "actually" think it would disappear. I have no idea where it is. Whatever agency caused it to relocate may be constrained by some physical conservation law.'

'So you wouldn't be surprised if it reappeared.'

'I'm never surprised.'

'And if it does come back?'

'I'll return to Middle Finger, to my parking orbit. With some new data for you physicists.'

Nobody had called me a physicist in a long time. I'm a science teacher and fish harvester and vacuum welder. 'I'll miss you, Ship.'

'I understand,' it said, and made a noise like a throat clearing. 'In your game with Charles, you should move the queen's rook to QR6. Then sacrifice your remaining knight to the pawn, and move the black bishop up to checkmate.'

'Thanks. I'll try to remember that.'

'I'll miss everybody,' it said without prompting. 'I do have plenty of information to move around and recombine; enough to keep busy for a long time. But it's not the same as the constant chaotic input from you.'

'Goodbye, Ship.'

'Goodbye, William.'

There was a line floating for the lift. I clambered down the steps hand-over-hand, feeling athletic.

I realized I had shifted into an emotional mode reminiscent of combat. Something over which I had no control had suddenly put me into a situation where I had a 20 percent chance of dying. Instead of apprehension, I felt a kind of resignation, and even impatience: let's get this over with, one way or the other.

Did I have three kilograms of stuff I wanted to take back to MF? The old book of paintings from the Louvre I'd picked that up from a pile of Earth artifacts when I left Stargate for Middle Finger, a fairly new thousand-year-old antique. That wasn't even a kilogram. I'd brought along my comfortable boots in case there were no cobblers forty thousand years in the future. But with only twenty-four years passing, Herschel Wyatt would probably still be at his last.

I wondered who would be fishing my trotlines. Not Bill. He would probably be in Centrus by now, totally integrated into Man. Hell, he might even have gone to Earth.

We might never see him again. That felt different now. I shook my head and four tiny globules of tears floated away from my lashes.

Marygay and I, along with the rest of the council and Diana and Charlie, waited till the last. The last shuttle was almost half empty: thirteen people had elected to stay behind.

Teresa Larson was their spokeswoman, still staying though her wife Ami was asleep aboard the second ship. Their daughter Stel was staying with Teresa; their other daughter was on MF.

'For me, there's no decision,' she said. 'God sent us on this pilgrimage, to come back and start anew. She interrupted our progress in order to test our faith.'

'You aren't going to start anew,' Diana said. 'You have ten thousand sperm and ova frozen, but not one of you knows how to thaw them out and combine them.'

'We'll make babies the old way,' she said bravely. 'Besides, we have plenty of time to study. We'll learn your arts.'

'No, you won't. You'll starve or freeze right here. God didn't take that antimatter away, and it's not coming back.'

Teresa smiled. 'You're only saying that on faith. You don't know any more about it than I do. And my faith is as good as yours.'

I wanted to shake some sense into her. Actually, I wanted to hunt them all down with the tranquilizer darts and load them aboard the ship unconscious. Almost everybody disagreed with me, though, and Diana wasn't sure that they could be hooked up properly without being conscious and cooperating.

'I'll pray for you all,' Teresa said. 'I hope you all survive and find a good life back home.'

'Thank you.' Marygay looked at her watch. Now go back to your people and tell them that at 0900 the ship will seal this door and evacuate the chamber. We can take anybody, everybody until 0800. After that, you just stay here and ... take your chances.'

'I want to go with you,' Diana said. 'One last chance to talk some sense into them.'

'No,' Teresa said. 'We've heard you, and the ship has repeated your argument twice.' To Marygay; 'I'll tell them what you said. We appreciate your concern.' She turned and floated away.

There was only one zero gee toilet. Stephen Funk came out of it looking pale. 'Your turn, William.'

The stuff tasted like honey with a dash of turpentine. The effect was an internal scalding waterfall.

In school, in anthropology, we read about an African tribe that lived all year on bread and milk and cheese. Once a year, they butchered a cow to gorge themselves on fat, because they thought diarrhea was a gift from the gods, a holy cleansing. They would have loved this stuff. Even I felt holier. In fact, I felt like one big empty hole.

I cleaned up and floated out. 'Have fun, Charlie. It's a moving experience.'

I floated and clambered over to the last escape ship, with its thirty coffins lined up in dim red light. Was this the last thing I would ever see? I could think of more pleasant scenes.

Diana helped me hook up the orthotics, with a lubricant that contained a muscle relaxant. It was easier than the last time, coming back from the last battle. I suppose they had learned something over the centuries.