Bless me, how little you look. So shall we all look—kings, and kaisers—stripped for the last voyage.
MAURICE MOGAMBO STEPPED out of the lander, took a few steps, and stopped to gaze at the Retreat. The oculus window gave it a kind of surprised look. How good to see you, Maurice. Nice of you to come by. We don’t get visitors here very often.
And yes, it’s true, that other group that was here earlier was right. I served as a refuge for two remarkable entities. They worked and studied here, and lived their lives undistracted by the routines you have to deal with. No bureaucracies, no competing specialists, no petty jealousies. Socrates would have been at home here.
The delegation that had accompanied him was spilling out across the shelf. Some had already surrounded the other lander. Martinson was on its ladder, and poking his head inside. Sheusi was gazing over the edge of the precipice. Hawkins was kneeling, chipping off a rock sample. Alvarez was taking pictures, recording every step of the inspection.
He was suddenly aware that Chardin was standing beside him. But Chardin understood this was not a time for idle conversation, and so he stayed a few paces to the rear, allowing Mogambo to absorb the moment.
It was, of course, the climax of a life already rich in achievement. His only regret was that he had not been first. (But he felt a tinge of guilt, and knew it was an unworthy sentiment, wishing for primacy in a place that seemed almost sacred.)
He was about to go inside when John Yurkiewicz, the Longworth’s captain, buzzed him. “Maurice,” he said, “We’ve completed the sweep of the other moons.”
Mogambo shook away the irritation he felt at being disturbed. Then he had to run the captain’s comment through a second time to extract its meaning. Damn. He knew what the result would be, but he had to be certain. “And is there anything of interest?”
“No, Professor. There’s nothing.”
“What about the Memphis? Have we heard from Hutchins?”
“The Memphis should be arriving about now at 97. But we haven’t heard from them yet. Do you wish me to contact them?”
“No. We have our plate full here at the moment, John. I’m sure they’ll let us know when they have something to report.”
Mogambo turned his attention back to the alien structure. It was, he thought, the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
IN ENGLISH.
“Yes. They identify themselves as Venture SL002. Voice only.”
“Venture?” Nick’s eyes went wide. “That’s not—”
Bill put it on audio. “PLEASE ASSIST. VICINITY SEPC 6A1193KKM.”
“Registry number is correct,” said the AI. “There has only been one vessel with that name.”
“What’s SEPC et cetera?”
“It’s the designation for 97 in the Pandel-Corbin star catalog. Which would have been in use at the time the Venture was lost.”
Something cold gripped her heart. The Venture was the second ship to attempt superluminal travel. After the Terra had made its historic journey to Alpha Centauri forty-two years before, the Venture had embarked on a flight to Wolf 359, carrying with it a crew of four, a team of scientists, and an NAU senator. It had never been heard from again. A search of the area around Wolf 359 had revealed no evidence that it had ever arrived, and its disappearance became one of the enduring mysteries of the age. The common wisdom held that its drive—which was by modern standards primitive—had failed after it made its jump into the sack, and that it had been lost in hyperspace. As a result of the Venture experience, Hazeltine engines had been modified. Now, if a failure was imminent, the system immediately took the vessel back into standard space. That sort of unscheduled and unexpected jump had occurred several times, and had caused a few injuries. But no ship since the Venture had simply vanished.
“Location?” she asked Bill.
“Pretty much on the other side of the sun.” He showed her. “Solar orbit,” he added. “But in a lot closer than we are.”
Alyx, who’d been sitting quietly through all this, leaned over and put a hand on Hutch’s shoulder. “That’s good news,” she said.
“I guess.”
“How could it not be?”
“Alyx, why do you suppose the chindi’s so far off course? What’s the point of coming in way out here? Is their navigation equipment that bad? It would take months to get to the Venture from here, unless it jumps again.”
Bill looked thoughtful. “Hutch,” he said, “it may be that their mass renders them far more vulnerable than we are if they arrive at a site that’s already occupied by a solid object. It might be that the mere existence of a small rock in their jump area could destabilize the entire ship.”
“You really think so?”
“I have no idea. But it is a possibility. And it explains why they would come here, rather than jumping into the inner system.”
But they’d have to do a secondary jump to manage things within a reasonable time. Did they have some sort of advanced technology that would allow them to do a quick scan, make sure everything was safe, and move in closer?
“It amazes me,” said Alyx. “Wherever the chindi goes, there’s something unusual to look at.”
Nick laughed. “Typical archeologists. They ignore us when we show up and say hello. Their only interest…”
“…Is in the dead,” Alyx finished.
“Bill,” said Hutch, “we’ll do another jump. Get as close as we can, then set course for the Venture. Leave a hypercomm probe here to alert us when the chindi shows up.”
EVERY SCHOOLCHILD KNEW what the Venture looked like. Small fat vehicle that seemed to be mostly composed of rocket tubes. There were eight of them. Landers attached on both beams. (In those days, an extra lander was considered an essential safety feature.) There were no viewports. No transparent material that was considered adequate to the hazards of space travel had yet been developed. A World Council flag was emblazoned on the hull.
And, of course, there was the historic registry number. SL002. Second ship of its class, superluminal.
What was it doing out here?
It was in solar orbit, about 180 million kilometers from the sun. None of its lights was on, but an antenna was rotating slowly.
“Forty years,” Nick said. “Another thirty or so, and its distress signal will reach Outpost.”
“Do we board?” asked Alyx.
Hutch’s eyes closed. Here we go again.
“We’ve time,” Alyx continued. “We’ve got nothing else to do until the chindi gets here.”
“No,” she said, after a long hesitation. “Let’s leave them in peace.”
“The chindi won’t,” said Nick. “They’ll insert a team, take pictures, and make off with some artifacts. That’s what they do.”
It’s what we do, thought Hutch.
The ancient ship occupied half a dozen screens. Hutch stared at it, at the gray hull, still polished after so many years, at the rotating antenna, at the twin landers. She’d seen a model of it on display at the Smithsonian when she’d been about ten. It had chilled her then, and it chilled her now. “Who wants to come with me?” she asked.
Nick’s leg was not going to allow him to go. Actually, he looked relieved to have a legitimate reason to stay back. Alyx volunteered, but it seemed more an act of bravado than of enthusiasm. They were learning.
“Hutch.” Bill again. “There’s something else out there.”
The chindi had arrived. Whatever she was going to do, she’d have to hurry.
But it wasn’t the chindi. The navigation screen lit up, and she was looking at one of the bottles. “It’s in the same orbit as the Venture.”
“The thing’s a probe,” said Nick. “This is how the chindi knows which systems are worth visiting.”
“Bill,” said Hutch, “the bottles that the chindi fired off: Did we track any of them headed this way?”
“For 97? No, Hutch. None was launched on a vector that would have brought it here. Unless there was a course correction somewhere. I only tracked them a short distance. While I was watching, none of them made a jump.”
Alyx frowned. “That’s odd,” she said.
“Maybe not,” said Hutch. “It would have had to be launched earlier than the group we saw. Those wouldn’t have had time to get here and communicate the results back. The chindi knew where it was going before it launched its probes. I think its schedule is lined up in advance. Maybe it knows where its next three or four stops will be. By the time it’s completed those, it’ll have seen the results from the group we saw dispatched.” But that seemed to confirm their earlier suspicion that it was possible to construct superluminal engines that were quite compact.
Alyx shook her head. “Too complicated for me.”
“What you’re saying,” said Nick, “is that periodically it sends out a swarm of probes. They look at, what, a couple of thousand systems, and send back the results. Anything that looks interesting gets a visit from the chindi.”
“That’s what I think,” said Hutch. “They get a visit, and if they pass muster, they get permanent observation satellites.”
“The stealths,” said Nick. “Which also function as a communication relay. You know, we literally have an interstellar communication web.” He folded his hands together and braced his chin on them. “Who are these people? Who’s doing this?”
“Somebody with a sense of theater,” said Alyx. “I mean, these guys don’t just record anything. They seem to be looking for dramatic stuff. Wars, religious festivals, moon landings, lost starships. Maybe even romance.” Her eyes were shining. “It’s as if someone didn’t want anything to get lost.”
“I think the way it works,” said Hutch, “is that the chindi comes in, does whatever it intends to, picks up artifacts, whatever.”
“But who does that?” asked Nick. “We didn’t see any sign of life over there.”
“It has to be automated. This is a long-term mission. Centuries, if we can believe the age assigned to the satellites at Safe Harbor. So they’d have to go with machines.”
“I wonder,” said Bill, “if there are more of these things out there. Chindis.”
THE VENTURE DEPARTED Earth May 6, 2182, thirteen weeks after the Terra’s epic-making Hazeltine flight to Alpha Centauri. Those were heady days. Suddenly, almost without warning—for almost no one had really expected the FTL system to work—the stars had opened up, and ships would be able to travel to Barnard’s in half a day, to Sirius in twenty hours, to Aldebaran in less than a week, to distant Antares in less than a month. It had been the occasion for a celebrated remark by the vice president of the North American Union that we would soon be transporting tourists to the other side of the galaxy. He seems to have been unaware that such a trip, even using Hazeltine technology, would require more than fifteen years. One way.
The Venture’s captain was Joshua Hollin, a veteran astronaut who had been with the Lance units on the first manned flight to Saturn. His crew had consisted of a navigator, an engineer, and a medical officer.
The passenger list was filled out by an international team of physicists, planetologists, meteorologists, and even a contact specialist. And, of course, Senator Caswell. They were not chosen primarily for their academic credentials, as such a unit would be now. Rather, selections had been weighted toward those who’d been willing to undergo extensive physical training. Even at that stage, there had no longer been a rationale for the requirement. It was left from an earlier period, when just getting into orbit could put a strain on a middle-aged body whose owner had neglected basic maintenance.
Bill produced their pictures and bios. They were all relatively young. (Their flight was in an age before the breakthroughs in rejuvenation therapy.) Nine men, six women.
Including among their number a pair of newlyweds. All obviously delighted with their good fortune.
Three hours and seventeen minutes after departure from Earth orbit, they had jumped, and disappeared from history. They had FTL communication, but not the technology for communicating during hyperflight. So no one expected to hear from them until they arrived at Wolf 359.
The flight should have taken twelve hours. The message announcing their arrival should have been back forty-seven minutes after their arrival. By the early-morning hours of May 7, the flight directors were puzzled. By dawn, they knew something had gone wrong.
A third ship, the Exeter, was hurried along and launched fourteen weeks later. But neither it, nor any of the several flights that followed, could find evidence that the Venture had ever arrived at its destination.
Bill produced schematics for the Venture. They weren’t complete, and Hutch wasn’t especially familiar with the technology. What she most needed was a couple of disks that would be compatible with its operating systems. “I’m sorry,” Bill told her, “but we lack the capability to produce them.”
“Let me know,” Hutch told him when she was ready to go, “as soon as the chindi shows up.”
“I am not only listening for the beeper,” said Bill, “but I’ve activated the long-range sweep as well. We will have plenty of advance notice.”
“Good.” The rescue plan was simple enough: The chindi would have to go into a parallel orbit to begin its examination of the Venture. When it did so, the Memphis would launch the shuttle and pick up Tor. Simple.
Once he was off, Hutch would turn the chindi and the Retreat and the Venture and everything else over to Mogambo and head home. It was a good feeling, knowing it was almost over.
She and Alyx pulled on grip shoes, tested their e-suits, and got into the lander. Hutch ran through her checklist and certified that they were ready for flight. The doors opened, lights went out, and they slid into the night.
THE VENTURE WAS still pressurized. Alyx watched Hutch remove a panel beside the airlock and open up manually. They passed through into the interior. “Air in here’s no good, Alyx,” she said, warning her not to shut off her suit.
Alyx had studied the layout of the Venture. She knew that the airlock opened into a common room, a chamber large enough to accommodate everybody. It was to have been a dining area, meeting room, and social center.
When the hatch cycled open, something moved in the dark interior. Alyx jumped, and literally came off the deck and crashed into a bulkhead. Hutch, equally startled, fell back into the lock.
When the beam from Hutch’s lamp revealed what had happened, Alyx got a second scare. They were face-to-face with a corpse.
It was afloat in the room, and apparently had reacted to air currents generated by opening hatches. It was mummified, its features so far dissolved that she couldn’t be sure whether it had been male or female. Hutch pointed at a second one, which had drifted into a corner. Alyx fought a sudden urge to bring up her lunch. She’d known before coming over that there would be bodies on the spacecraft, but she hadn’t thought it out, had expected them to be lying about.
She tried to concentrate on details. Their names. Get their names. Both bodies were in jumpsuits, and their name patches were clear. Saperstein. And Cheveau. She checked her list. A physicist from Bremerhaven, and a biologist from Marseille. Male and female. Twenty-five and twenty-six at the time of their deaths.
“What happened here?” said Hutch. Her voice sounded a few decibels higher than normal.
There were more corpses. Three in the galley, three in cargo, several in the living compartments.
Alyx wondered what had killed them. Had they simply run out of air?
Hutch seemed to know where she wanted to go, and Alyx stayed close. Her ankle was still a problem, but only if she lost track of what she was doing and forgot not to push off on it. Nick’s voice crackled over the commlink, asking what they had found.
Hutch told him. “Must have been a major mechanical malfunction,” she added.
Alyx was still concentrating on thinking about other things. Nick back in the Memphis. The audience reaction at the conclusion of opening night for Grin and Bare It. A prop handler who’d been the most torrid sexual partner she’d had in years.
“You okay?” asked Hutch.
“I’m fine.” She was suddenly aware she was standing with her arms folded across her breast, as if she were fending something off. “Place is a little creepy. But I’m all right.”
“You want to go back?”
“No. Not unless you do.”
Hutch indicated a hatch in the overhead. “Bridge is that way,” she said.
“You first.” Alyx tried to sound lighthearted. Hutch released her grip shoes and floated up, opened the hatch after a brief struggle, and disappeared.
“No ladder,” Alyx commented.
“They didn’t have artificial gravity.”
There were four more corpses. Alyx imagined she could smell them, and that, too, she had to push out of her mind. Hutch threaded her way among them and leaned over a console. She touched the keys, and Alyx was surprised to see a row of lamps blink on.
“Power’s residual,” said Hutch. “The Venture won’t be going anywhere for a while.”
“Can you tell what caused this?”
“No idea.”
“How about asking the AI?”
Her fingers were moving across the keyboard, but nothing much seemed to be happening. “It’s defunct.” A green glow appeared. “But we’ve got a log.”
“You can read it?”
“Don’t know. We don’t seem to have enough power to turn on a screen.” She looked around the console, found a small storage compartment, opened it, and extracted two disks.
“I never saw one like that before,” said Alyx.
“Bill doesn’t think it’ll still hold data. But we can try.” She looked for a slot, found it, inserted one of the disks.
More lamps came on. Hutch produced a power core which she’d apparently brought from the Memphis and connected it. The system clicked and sputtered and wheezed and stopped. She reset and tried again.
It took several attempts before she looked satisfied.
“Are you copying the log?” Alyx asked.
“Yes. I think we’re in business.” She extracted the disk and put it in her pocket. “Let’s try some diagnostics.”
She pulled the jack on the core, moved one of the corpses out of the way, slipped into a seat in front of what appeared to be the captain’s console, buckled herself down so she wouldn’t float off, and reconnected her power source.
“Will we be able to read the log when we get back to the Memphis?” Alyx asked.
“We can probably jury-rig something.” She searched the instrument panel, found what she was looking for, and inserted the second disk.
“You couldn’t get the same information,” Alyx asked, “from the other position?”
“If I knew what I was doing.” She threw switches and pressed pads, and the console came to life. She studied it, spoke to it, gave up and tapped the keyboard. A computer display came to life. A parade of images began. “It wasn’t the engines,” she said finally. “They’re okay. Both sets.”
This bridge felt claustrophobic. The lack of a viewport, of a way to see outside, compounded by the darkness, and the presence of the things (one could hardly call them bodies), squeezed her lungs. She held on to the back of the chair that Hutch was using and felt the room move around her.
“It wasn’t the fuel. And apparently not the reactor.”
Alyx was concentrating on trying to breathe normally. She turned her suit temperature down and felt better as soon as the cool air hit. Looking for something to distract her, she turned her lamp toward the rear of the bridge. There was an open hatch, and she recalled from the schematic that there were more living quarters and a common room back there. Without letting go of Hutch’s chair, she pointed her lamp toward it, and saw more moving shadows.
“Hull integrity’s okay.” Hutch sounded puzzled.
“Got to be something,” said Alyx, who was wishing Hutch would get her answer so they could clear out.
The pilot stiffened. “Now this I don’t understand at all.”
Her tone was disquieting. “What’s that?” Alyx asked.
“The hypercomm checks out.”
Alyx needed a moment to understand. The hypercomm was the FTL communication system. If it was okay, and they’d gotten stranded out here, all they had to do was call for help.
“But they never used it, did they?”
“No. They used the radio instead.”
The crew had to know that a radio distress call could never arrive back home during their lifetimes. “Makes no sense,” Alyx said.
Hutch was running another diagnostic. A red lamp began to burn brightly. “It wouldn’t work now,” she said. “The ship doesn’t have enough power to support it, but it would have worked forty years ago. Why didn’t they use it?”
She moved methodically through the Venture, recording everything. Alyx pursued the assignment she’d given herself, committing the images and sensations to memory, knowing that one day she would relay them in one form or another to an audience. She even had a title: Everything’s Under Control Now.
“Shouldn’t we recover the bodies?” she asked reluctantly. “Before the chindi gets here?”
Hutch nodded.
THEY BROUGHT OUT nineteen corpses in three loads with the lander, and stowed them in the cargo-section freezer. Nick couldn’t help, but Alyx made all three trips, sitting quietly beside the pilot. On the Memphis, Bill turned off the artificial gravity, and they brought in the bagged remains quite easily.
Hutch seemed to get through it okay although her eyes looked a bit strange afterward.
She went below for a while and left Alyx and Nick to have lunch. But Alyx had no appetite, and she satisfied herself with a glass of orange juice while Nick ate his way through a couple of roast beef sandwiches and commented about how gratified he was that the passengers and crew of the Venture would finally get proper disposition.
“It’s a terrible thing,” he said, “when people die in out-of-the-way places, and their families are left to wonder what happened. The consolation of a final ceremony is a very important part of closing the book on a life. Of giving their loved ones a chance to move on.” He looked at her, and she smiled weakly at him. One of the great funeral directors of our time, as he’d occasionally referred to himself. “Even now, so many years later, it’ll help the surviving families, bringing the remains back.” He turned a somber gaze in her direction. “Did you know that every intelligent species for which we have a record engaged in memorial services, funerals, for its dead? Other than the development of religion and tribes, the farewell ceremony seems to be the only true sociological universal.”
Hutch came back wearing a wide smile and holding a standard disk. “I think we’re ready,” she said.
They went into the room no one thought of as mission control anymore, and Hutch inserted the disk into a reader. A couple of screens lit up, and Alyx found herself looking at portraits and biographical information on one, and launch data, passenger lists, inventories, and system status reports on the other. It was all dated May 6, 2182.
Departure from the Liberty space station (long since replaced by the Wheel) would occur later that morning after a virtual rendition by the Peabody, Nebraska, Volunteers High School Band, a few speeches, and a tribute to Senator Edith Caswell, “the first senator-to-the-stars.” Captain Hollin noted that they had everything except fireworks.
Hutch fast-forwarded through the ceremony. Senator Caswell (dark-haired, attractive, eyes glowing with enthusiasm for the coming adventure) came on board, everyone shook hands, and, while the band played a stirring rendition of the Jupiter Symphony, the Venture eased away from the space station.
Transition to hyperspace occurred smoothly a few hours later, with only a few passengers reporting upset stomachs. Hull-mounted imagers were turned on, and passengers and crew got their first look at the sack, the hyperdimensional mist through which the ship had to pass, in a casual glide, en route to Wolf 359.
Six hours after transition, halfway to their destination, the upset stomachs grew worse. And spread to others. The captain recorded the names of those affected in the medical log, and noted that they were being treated.
It was the last entry.
“That wasn’t very helpful,” said Nick.
Alyx stared at the disk, which Hutch had removed from the reader. “You sure that’s all?” she said.
“That’s what the computer says.”
Nick shook his head. “Sounds like food poisoning. Or something in the water.”
Hutch put the disk away. “Maybe there’ll be something in the other records,” she said. She was frowning.
“Something wrong, Hutch?” asked Alyx.
“We’ve been here about thirty hours.”
The others understood the point.
Where was the chindi?
MOGAMBO STOOD QUIETLY over the two graves. What I would not give to have known you. To have been able to speak with you. The library will be a poor substitute.
Inside, his people were busy doing analysis, trying to understand the language of the books. He could see them moving behind the curtained windows. But they were peripheral, shadows at the edge of vision, images not quite grasped.
They were good people, basically, but they were Philistines. Hodge had even wanted to dig up the graves. Eventually, he knew, it would come to that. But not now. Not while he was here.
He had spent hours simply wandering through the Retreat, absorbing it, standing in the cupola while the two great planets moved majestically about each other, gradually changing places, the rings seeming to tilt first toward him and then away as Vertical moved in its orbit. It was hard not to see the hand of an Artist at work. He knew better, of course, knew that the universe was a machine, that everything—well, almost everything—could be explained by the presence of gravity and hydrogen, weak force and strong force. And yet…
His wrist tingled. Incoming from the captain. “Yes, John? What is it?”
“Professor, we received a request from the Memphis a little while ago. They wanted us to check to see whether the chindi was still running on course.”
“You mean, they don’t think it’s jumped yet?”
“They don’t know. It’s clear from the message that it hasn’t arrived out at 97.”
“Well, what’s the situation, John? Has it gone into hyperspace yet? I take it we don’t know.”
“No, sir. We can’t tell from here. It’s too far out. With your permission, I’m going to go have a look.”
“How long will you need?”
“Only a few hours.”
“Yes,” he said. “Do it.”
LIKE HUTCH, MOGAMBO had no way to penetrate the books. He wandered through the Retreat, touching the open volumes, brushing his fingertips along the spines of the volumes on the shelves. Those hours brought a mixture of pleasure and longing, of exquisite pain, quite unlike anything he’d experienced before during a long and eventful life.
His subordinates were already laying plans, determining how best to move the structure and its contents back to Arlington. He disapproved of the idea, and had already fired off a message to Sylvia telling her how wrongheaded the plan was. He hadn’t realized until he’d arrived on the scene that the Retreat and its environment were what mattered, that it wasn’t possible to move it back to Virginia, that the essence was here, and that it needed to be left here.
And damn the inconvenience to anybody who didn’t want to make the trip.
It seemed as if Yurkiewicz had barely left when he was back on the circuit. “It’s still out there,” he said.
“It hasn’t jumped yet?”
“No.”
“I don’t understand that at all. Well, have you informed Hutchins?”
“Yes sir. Sent the message out a few minutes ago.”
“What’s it doing? The chindi?”
“That’s what amazes me. It’s up to a quarter cee. That doesn’t seem possible.”
“I would certainly think not. It’s not still accelerating, is it?”
“No. It’s in cruise.”
Mogambo sighed. A quarter light-speed. And in cruise. Did that mean what he thought it did? How could they possibly have been so wrong?
“Are you okay, Professor?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m fine.” But he suspected he would never, in this lifetime, set foot on the chindi.
AFTER SHE SENT off her message to the Longworth asking for a sensor sweep, Hutch settled down to wait through a long and increasingly discouraging evening. The chindi had to be coming. The bottle satellite, the marker, was here. The Venture was here. Where else could it be going?
If it was operating with Hazeltine technology, it had to make the transition into hyperspace within a reasonable time after achieving jump velocity. Whatever that might be for a ship so massive. “Reasonable” was defined by the capability of the vessel to go on burning fuel in order to maintain acceleration after it was no longer necessary.
Nick had dozed off in his chair. Alyx was reading when Bill notified her that a transmission had come in from the Longworth. “From Captain Yurkiewicz.”
“Hold your breath, Alyx,” she said. “Let’s see what the good captain has to say.”
Yurkiewicz was a big, ruddy man, a bit rough around the edges compared with most of the superluminal captains. He’d been around a long time, and had done a brief stint with the Academy when they first went out to Pinnacle. “Hutch,” he said, “it’s still out there. It’s at the limit of our long-range sensors. But it’s there.” He looked both relieved and worried. “Thank God we haven’t lost it altogether.
“It’s 323 A.U.s from Gemini. Moving at.26c. I say again, 26c. In cruise. I doubt it could jump now if it wanted to.”
In cruise. No longer accelerating.
When the transmission ended, when the screen had gone back to the Memphis icon, Alyx looked hard at Hutch. “How bad is it?” she asked carefully.
They’d missed the obvious. My God. A quarter light-speed. Tor was dead. How could they not have known what was happening?
“Isn’t it coming?” Alyx asked.
“It’s coming,” she said. Nick stirred, but didn’t wake. “But it’s going to be later than we expected.”
“How much later?”
“I don’t know. Maybe two centuries.”