"You could wait until morning. "

"I daren't. It may have been accidental, but there has been damage."

As Drake spoke he was moving toward the building. He went carefully and quietly, the bar from the pinnace's landing gear held close to his chest. Everything was silent except for the slowing patter of raindrops.

At the wall he halted. The opening was big enough to take the whole lander. Was it just inside, where he might fly it right out again? Or had it been dragged down a ramp to some deeper level?

He took two cautious steps inside. Immediately he felt a violent blow on his ribs, just below the left nipple. He swung the bar without thinking. It crunched into something that screamed, so loudly and at so high a pitch that it hurt his ears. He felt a blow on his left hip, then another on his right arm. Two invisible objects brushed past him. He turned and followed. He was in time to see two tall white shapes vanishing into the twilight.

The rain had slowed to a few random drops. A ghostly flicker of light showed, far off across the field. Then another.

A creaking sound came from behind him. He quickly spun around to face it.

No tall white shape was leaping out of the dark doorway to attack him, but suddenly there was another flicker of light from inside the building. It provided enough illumination for him to see the lander. It had been hauled into the middle of the room and tilted onto its side. Unless it could be righted, it would not fly. ?

"Are you hurt?" The ship could not see him, but it was receiving a record of his rapid movements.

"I'm all right. But the lander is damaged."

"Can it be fixed?"

"I don't know." Again there was light inside the building, this time a ruddy glare that varied in brightness like a sputtering flame. "I have to go in again."

The ship said something in reply, but he did not hear it. His attention was focused on the wall beyond the opening. It reflected light from sources farther inside. Torches burned there, orange red and erratic.

Drake moved forward, the rough-edged metal bar over his shoulder. He thought he was ready, but the speed and violence of the attack surprised him.

Half a dozen of them came out of the darkness like white ghosts. They had crouched waiting at the side of the room.

Sharp pincers sank into his left arm. His reflexive jerk backward at the sudden pain saved him. The crude machete that slashed at his middle cut through his clothing but made only a long and shallow skin wound.

He turned and smashed at the pincered head. It shattered and splashed cold liquid over his face and neck. He continued his turn, flailing away at anything within reach. The ghost with the machete whistled and screeched as the metal bar caught it solidly in the middle. It fell away, taking another with it. Then Drake was running for the opening.

The torchlight behind him was brighter.

He ran thirty yards from the building before he turned to look behind. Everything was quiet. No white shapes sprang through the hole in the wall. No orange torches flared from inside. For the moment he was safe.

"Are you receiving me clearly?"

"Perfectly clearly. I project clearing skies and visual oversight in another two hours."

"That will be too long. Listen carefully and place this into the permanent record." The admonition was unnecessary, but Drake had to be sure. "Your suggestion that this planet has gone beyond the postindustrial phase was correct, but the principal intelligence has not moved to a more advanced form. It has regressed to primitivism. We did not observe the dominant intelligence earlier, because it is nocturnal and spends the days underground in these buildings. Based on what I have seen, there is no chance that this planet will provide the space-borne technology that we need. Many of the old systems are still running, but I'd guess that the present inhabitants have little idea how they work. It's just as likely that they worship them now.

"Here are your instructions. Continue the search for a space-faring civilization throughout this galaxy. If you aresuccessful, resurrect a copy of me and enlist the aid of whatever beings you find. If you search this whole galaxy and find nothing useful, do not continue to the next nearest one. The quest for our home galaxy without a signal to guide us could take to the end of time. Instead, begin a survey of this galaxy with a different objective. Look for a stellar system where raw materials are available in easily accessible form. You know what is needed for the creation of an S-wave signal detector. When you reach the right stellar system, resurrect copies of me, as many as will be needed to perform the space construction work. Build the signal detector, and use it. Do you understand these instructions?"

"I understand their meaning, but not your reason for giving them. What of you ? Do you not propose to seek the lander and return to orbit?"

"I wish I could do that."

"Then why do you give me instructions that omit discussion of your own future actions'?"

"Because I don't think my actions here are going to have much bearing on what you must do." Drake could see the flicker of torches within the building. "I think the Morlocks are getting ready to try again."

"I do not understand the term 'Morlocks.' "

"That's all right. I didn't expect you to." The torches inside the building were brighter. Drake backed up a few steps. He could smell his own blood, a strong and characteristic scent that he had known only once before in his life. He rubbed at his wounded left arm, then at the cut on his right side. It was strange how little he felt the pain. How would they attack, singly or in groups? Would he be better off in the open, or with his back against one of the walls?

"I suggest that you proceed with patience. It is not necessary for you to return to orbit in the immediate future. The local food substances are not suitable for you, but I can transmit information for their processing that will allow you to consume them. The life expectancy of your body is many centuries. In that time the situation on the surface may change."

"It will change all right." Drake turned, wondering if he might find a hiding place along the road or out in the fields. He saw lights, far off but steadily nearing. He would do better to head for the nearest building and make his stand there.

"In any case." The ship spoke while he was sprinting across sodden vines. "I cannot desert you. I must stay here as long as you survive. That may be centuries."

"It may. It would be nice to think that it will be." Drake was panting, his back to the building wall. He clutched his metal bar, all that he had to hold on to. The torches were nearing, crowding in to make a dense ring through which he saw no way to break. "Stay until I die, then go."

They were closer. Long bodies gleamed pale orange in the smoky light of torches held in spidery forelimbs. He could see the razor-sharp pincers. They gaped wide enough to grasp his head. He lifted the metal bar, weighing it in his hands.

"Wish me luck." He took a deep breath through his mouth. "It won't be long now."

Interlude: Dutchman The monitor ships had been designed by Cass Leemu and Mel Bradley with great care and ingenuity. They must be able to survive without external services or maintenance for up to a million years in orbit, all the while performing continuous observation and analysis. They must be entirely self-sufficient, able to take energy as necessary from any source. They must contain enough stored information to answer any question that a copy of Drake Merlin, embodied on the surface of a planet and awaiting the arrival of the Shiva, might ask.

The composites represented by Cass and Mel had been careful and ingenious in their work, but not wasteful. They did not include features that could not under any reasonable scenario be needed.

So no plan had been made for a ship to survive passage through a caesura. No ship had been designed to operate in galaxies far from human control and influence. No capability had been included for the on-board production of self-replicating machines. The design guaranteed that a ship be able to operate for millions of years, but not forunspecified billions.

Cass and Mel, at Drake's insistence, had gone beyond reasonable and foreseeable needs in just one area. The first humans, long ago, had emerged from the caves of Pleistocene Earth with brains already large enough to write sonnets, invent and play chess, compose fugues, and solve partial differential equations. They had not really needed such abilities in a world where hunting, gathering food, breeding, and nurturing seemed the only fixed constants.

But a bigger-than-necessary brain had proved an advantage. It might be necessary again. Drake wanted each ship to be created not only self-aware, but intelligent enough to review the probable consequences of its instructions and of its own actions.

This ship had received unusual and specific instructions: Seek a civilization that was already space-faring. Then rouse Drake from dormancy to interact with whatever-if anything -was found. Should no space-faring intelligence be located, within this galaxy, build a superluminal signal detector. Drake would have to be roused from dormancy and embodied to help with that, because the ship lacked the general-purpose robots needed for large space construction.

The instructions implied several other imperatives. First, the ship must survive. It must do whatever was needed to ensure its continued operation. It must also be patient.

The ship wandered alone across the sea of stars. There was no way that it could ever land on a body bigger than a small asteroid. Its own weight would destroy its fragile structure. A copy of Drake Merlin, far more robust, could be downloaded into an organic body while the ship was in orbit around a planet and landed there, but it was impossible for a large S-wave detector to be constructed on a planetary surface.

Remaining in operating condition would not be difficult for the ship itself. Material resources for self-renewal were plentiful around many stars and in the dust clouds scattered through the spiral arms.

In any case, that was not going to be the problem.

The ship found an open lane of the galaxy and drifted along it, far from the disturbing effects of suns and singularities and dust clouds. It performed its careful analysis: eighty-eight billion stars in this galaxy; a mere two hundred targets as sources of potential intelligence--five-eighths of them already eliminated by direct inspection.

It would be a straightforward if lengthy task to look at the rest. The ship could certainly handle that.

But now, assume that the search was unsuccessful, that no space-going intelligent life was found, that it was necessary to take the next step. Then the time scale for action expanded enormously. Years increased from millions to billions. To build an S-wave detector-one large enough to see into the deepest reaches of space-was a monstrous task. Drake Merlin, in his final orders from the clouded surface of the planet, could not have known what he was demanding.

But the ship knew.

It also knew that it had no choice. Unlike a human, a ship's brain could not elect the annihilation of self.

As the ship computed the trajectory for the next target star, it mapped out the mandated sequence of its future actions if the current search failed to produce the right kind of intelligent life.

Find the right type of dust cloud, one close enough to a recent supernova to be rich in the necessary heavy elements.

Embody Drake Merlin-not once, but in a hundred or a thousand or a million copies. (And never consider their eventual fate.) Use the Merlins, singly and working in unison, as laborers. In the absence of intelligent robots, Merlins must mine the dust cloud, build the space production facility, shape the strands of the antennas and stretch them across space in the precise configuration demanded for signal detection of S-wave sources.

It could be done. The ship saw practical obstacles-it must husband its limited drive, coasting without power for thousands of years between target stars, taking advantage of every natural force field and particle wind of the galaxy; but there was nothing impossible.

Except, perhaps, for the time that all this would take.

The ship made the calculation and regarded the result. It could not sigh or wince, but it wished that it was possible to go back to Drake Merlin in the last moments before the horde of white ghosts had swarmed over him, and ask if this was what he really wanted.

It knew the answer to that question. The on-board information base made it clear: Drake Merlin did not want any ofthis. He wanted his lost wife. The odds against that made everything in the ship's calculations seem like certainty by comparison.

The next target star was known, the most economical flight path computed and ready. There was no further reason for delay.

The ship set out on its multibillion-year journey, sailing the endless trade winds of an indifferent galaxy.

Chapter 28.

"From far, from eve and morning And yon twelve-winded sky"

Who would ever have thought that it could take so long?

Drake drifted through space, his suited body slowly turning. He had left the ship in order to inspect the overall condition of the structure. How many times had he been downloaded to do this, he or some other of the multiple copies of himself? How many times had everything been found to be in working order, and how many times had he returned to electronic storage?

A thousand, ten thousand, a million. It made no difference. The S-wave detector was all around, a construct whose nodes and gossamer filaments stretched away past the point where his eyes could trace their presence against the stars. The great array was supposed to be able to detect evidence of superluminal message activity out to the red shift limit. It had been set up to operate automatically and indefinitely, if necessary without human or ship supervision. One by one, galaxies would be looked at until the whole universe had been surveyed. The process would stop only when a signal was detected. So far the instrument had reported nothing but a steady hiss of background noise.

If the array was working to specification, was something wrong with the basic theory? In principle a super-luminal signal would traverse the universe in hours; but confirmation of the theory had been made only in the home galaxy, over distances a millionth as far as current needs.

His attention moved beyond the detector array to the far-off glow of stars and galaxies. His eyes could not see the change, but he knew that it was there.

Not the end yet, but the subtle beginning of the end. Already the great dust clouds had been consumed, the blazing blue supergiant stars long ago exploded to supernovas or collapsed to black holes. Every main sequence star was far along in its lifetime, reduced from a bloated red giant to a white dwarf hardly bigger than the original Earth. Only the slow-burning low-mass stars remained, doling out miserly dribbles of radiation; their energy supply would be sufficient for another hundred billion years.

Except that such a period was not available. The cosmos itself was evolving, changing. The ship reported to Drake that the universe was far past its critical point. The remote galaxies displayed a strong blue shift, a displacement of the light toward shorter wavelengths. The microwave background radiation, diluted and cooled during the earlier expansion of the universe, now revealed an increase in its black body temperature.

The universe was warming up. The Great Expansion was far in the past. The collapse, toward the final singularity and the end of time, was under way.

But thought's the slave of life, and life time's fool; and time, that takes survey of all the world, must have a stop.

Drake halted his drift through space but permitted the slow rotation of his suited figure. He, like time, was taking survey of all the world. It seemed his task must have no stop-until the universe itself put an end to it.

The current inspection was complete. He might as well head back to the ship. On the other hand, there was no hurry.

When he returned he would be uploaded again to electronic storage. His new sleep might be for a million or a billion years, but he could expect little change when he awoke. The march from here to the end of the universe would be slow and stately, a multibillion-year progression. Only the final months and days would be spectacular. To anyone around to watch them, they would display unimaginable violence.The ship was a tiny gleam of gold at the center of the black web of the S-wave detection system. Drake headed toward it, glancing from time to time to his left. The dust cloud that had provided the materials for the detector still hung there, glowing faintly by its internal light. It was too small to collapse under its own gravitational attraction. That, and the constraining field placed in position by the ship, had been the key to its continued survival.

Drake, occupied with his thoughts, had turned off the suit unit linking him with the ship. There was no danger in doing so. Communications could be activated in an emergency by the ship's brain, although the many billions of years since entering the caesura had never produced a single override.

He switched the communicator on when he was just a few kilometers from the ship, and was shocked to hear a brief repeated message.

"Superluminal signal activity has been detected. Analysis is under way. Superluminal-"

"What! Why didn't you call and tell me?"

"That seemed . . . premature." The ship was oddly hesitant. "There are anomalies that require explanation."

"Then you'd better tell me about them." Drake was sliding through the molecular interstitial lock at record speed. He felt a sense of exultation at his special good fortune. He had been the one embodied when the signal came! Then he felt stupid. Since every embodiment was one version of him, there was no way that he could not be the one embodied when an S-wave message was detected.

"Where does the signal come from?"

"It is multiple signals, from a galaxy about eight hundred million light-years away. In cosmic terms, that is rather close. It lies on the far side of one of the great gulfs, but in a super-cluster that is still one of our neighbors."

"What do the messages say?"

"That is where the anomaly begins. First, the signals lack standard header records, identifying their source and destination. "

"Maybe they were broadcast."

"That cannot be the case. An S-wave signal is like any other, it must be tightly beamed to be read at more than a few hundred light-years. But even if the signals had been broadcast, they would carry a source identification. That, however, is not the most disturbing feature. The real problem is that the signals are unintelligible. We are not dealing with a single detected signal, where the problem might be one of resolving ambiguities. We are picking up millions of bit streams, an abundance of test data. Although we carry with us every known communication protocol, these superluminal signals conform to none of them."

"Maybe it's a new protocol, something that came into use after we passed through the caesura. We've been gone for so long, changes are inevitable."

"True. But the signals are totally unrecognizable. Change is more than likely, it is even necessary to reflect new needs and new technology. However, just as the human body carries within it elements of your own most archaic history, from fingernails to body hair to embryonic gill slits, so any superluminal signal ought to carry at least some semblance of the old communication protocols. These do not. They are wholly unfamiliar. "

"Are you still working to crack them?"

"Naturally. However, I am not optimistic. Already I have employed eighty percent of the analytical tools available to me, with no success. The most probable explanation is also the least satisfying."

Drake didn't need to ask what it was. The possibility had been discussed with the ship's brain during each of his embodiments.

"Assume that it is an independent civilization, aliens who have never encountered humans but are advanced enough to use S-wave signaling. How would it affect our ability to send a signal to them?"

"To send a signal? That would be very easy. Our S-wave detector can transmit as accurately and rapidly as it receives. That would not seem to be the issue here. The question is, What will happen to our signal when it is received in the other galaxy?""That's going to be my problem, isn't it?" Drake saw no point in talking generalities any longer. "Once I'm back in electronic storage, how long will it take to transmit me superluminally?"

"A few hours at the most. "

"Then let's do it. You said eight hundred million light-years?"

"Eight hundred and eighteen million, to be more precise. "

"How much travel time is that for you-allowing for fuel and maintenance and everything else?"

"Most would have to be in coast phase, since between the galaxies there are no ready sources of materials or energy. Necessarily, that would imply long periods of low or zero acceleration. The travel time would be a billion years or more."