But he had rotated his chair until he faced the desktop, and was briskly working a mouse. Images flickered over the screen. He settled on a star field—obviously color-enhanced—the stars were yellow, crimson, blue, against a purple-black background. Around a central orange-white pinpoint were two concentric rings, like smoke rings. The inner one was quite fine, but the outer, perhaps four times its diameter, was fatter, brighter. Both the rings were off-center, and ragged, lumpy, broken.

I searched for something to say. “It looks like a Fireball XL-Five end credit.”

Sometimes he lacked humor. “Fireball was in black and white.”

“Tell me what I’m seeing, Peter.”

“It’s the center of the Galaxy,” he said. “Twenty-five thousand light-years away. A reconstruction, of course, from infrared, X-ray, gamma ray, radio images, and the like; the light from the center doesn’t reach us because of dust clouds. The sun is one of four hundred billion stars, stuck out in a small spiral arm—you know the Galaxy is a spiral. At the core, everything is much more crowded. And everything is big and bright. It’s Texas in there.” He pointed at the image. “Some of these ’stars’ are actually clusters. These rings are clouds of gas and dust; the outer one is maybe a hundred light-years across.”

“And the bright object at the center—”

“Another star cluster. Very dense. It’s thought there is a black hole in there, with the mass of a million suns.”

“I don’t see any aliens.”

He traced out the rings. “These rings are expanding. Hundreds of miles a second. And the less structured clouds are hot, turbulent. It’s thought that the big rings are debris from massive explosions in the core. There was a giant bang about a million years ago. The most recent eruption seems to have been twenty-seven thousand years ago. The light took twenty-five thousand years to get here—it arrived about two thousand years ago; the Romans might have seen something . . . If you look wider you can see the debris of more explosions, reaching much deeper back in time, some of them still more immense.”

“Explosions?”

“Nobody knows what causes them. Stars are simple objects, George, physically speaking. So are galaxies, even. Much simpler than bacteria, say. There really shouldn’t be such mysteries. I think it’s possible we’re seeing intelligence there—or rather stupidity.”

I laughed, but it was a laugh of wonder at the audacity of the idea. “The Galaxy center as a war zone?”

He didn’t laugh. “Why not?”

I felt chilled, but I had no clear idea why. “And how does Kuiper fit into this?”