Peter said hesitantly, “But there’s still time. Have you seen this?” He held up his cell phone. It was a complex new toy from Nokia or Sony or Casio. I didn’t recognize it; I’ve no interest in such gadgets. But the screen was glowing with a bright image, a kind of triangle. “Just came in. The latest on the Kuiper Belt. The Anomaly.”

Two days after the discovery, everybody on Earth within reach of a TV probably knew that the Kuiper Belt is a loose cloud of comets and ice worlds that surrounds the solar system, stretching all the way from Pluto halfway out to the nearest star. And a bunch of astronomers, probing that chill region with radars or some such, had found something unusual.

Peter was explaining earnestly that the image on his screen wasn’t a true image but had been reconstructed from complicated radar echoes. “It’s the way you can reconstruct the structure of DNA from X-ray diffraction echoes—”

The little screen gleamed brightly in the dark of the loft. “It’s a triangle.”

“No, it’s three-dimensional.” He tapped a key and the image turned.

“A pyramid,” I said. “No—four sides, all of them triangles. What do you call it?”

“A tetrahedron,” Peter said. “But it’s the size of a small moon.”

I shivered in the cold gloom, feeling oddly superstitious. It was an awful enough time for me already, and now there were strange lights in the sky . . . “Something artificial?”

“What else could it be? The astronomers got excited just from their detection of straight-line edges. Now they’re seeing this.” His pale eyes were bright, reflecting the blue glow of the little screen. “Of course not everybody agrees; some say this is just an artifact of the signal processing, and there’s nothing there but echoes . . . There’s talk of sending a probe. Like the Pluto Express. But it might take decades to get there.”

I looked down at the comics. “They should send Fireball,” I said. “Steve Zodiac would be there in a couple of hours.” Suddenly my vision misted, and a big heavy drop of liquid splashed from my nose onto a colored panel. I wiped it off hastily. “Shit. Sorry.” But now my shoulders were shaking.

“It’s okay,” Peter said evenly.

I fought for control. “I hadn’t expected to fucking cry. Not over a fucking comic.”

He took my mug, still full, and headed down the stairs. “Take as long as you want.”

“Oh, fuck off,” I said, and so he did.

When I got over my spasm I clambered down out of the loft, bringing only the slide rule and log tables with me. I’d intended to head back to my city-center hotel, comforted that at least I’d pushed through the barrier, at least I’d been inside the house, and whatever else I turned up couldn’t distress me as much as today.