My finger hovered over the DELETE button. Part of me responded to all this stuff. But the adult part of me was beginning to regret letting this strange obsessive into my life.

I read on.

He told me about the Pioneers: two deep-space probes launched in the seventies by NASA. They had been the first probes to fly past Jupiter and Saturn. And after that, they had just kept on going. By now, more than three decades after their launch, they had passed far beyond the orbit of Pluto—and there was nothing to stop them, it seemed, until they swam among the stars a few hundred thousand years from now.

But something was slowing them down. More anomalous information he and his pals the Slan(t)ers had dug up.

“The two Pioneers are decelerating. Not by much, a mere ten-billionth of an Earth gravity, but it’s real. Right now the first Pioneer is off-course by the distance between the Earth and the moon. And nobody knows what’s causing it.” But perhaps it was dark matter. “Maybe for something as isolated and fragile as a Pioneer, dark matter effects start to dominate. It’s interesting to speculate what will happen if we ever try to drive a starship out there—”

Or it might be a fuel leak, I thought. Or just paint, sublimating in the vacuum. Oddly, I felt reluctant to discourage him.

“I’m coming to think dark matter is the key to everything . . .”

I pressed a key to store the file.

The second notable mail was from my ex-wife.

Linda had heard about my dad’s death from our mutual friends, and wanted to see me. We had always gotten together regularly. I suppose we both accepted that after a decade of marriage, now buried in the irrevocable past, we had too much in common to ever cut the ties completely. Over an exchange of mails, we agreed to meet on neutral territory.

I flew back to London the next day. I left Florida without regrets.