“Absolutely nothing.”

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

“Cool, right?”

“Why haven’t any astronomers reported anything strange out there?” I asked. “It must have some kind of signature.”

“Stealth technology maybe. Who knows. But it’s there. And I plan to take it over.”

“But if you can’t see it …”

“I can’t, you’re right. But I know where it is.”

“Where is Eigen?” I asked.

“Come, let me introduce you to someone.”

3

At a computer terminal near the eyepiece of the giant telescope was a giant man. He stood to shake my hand upon being introduced, rising to his full seven feet. He smiled easily but was clearly nervous, if not shy. His name was Jean Luc Monfils.

“Jean Luc has been keeping up with the object for me,” Sill said. “As I understand it, it’s not an easy task. Some business about catching reflections of the signatures of other celestial bodies. Is that about right, Jean Luc?”

“Periodically, the craft appears, then disappears again,” he said with a French accent. “It is read as an echo or sorts, clutter, sometimes space dust. That’s why no one has discovered it or made note of it. Well, they have no doubt seen it and then thought, Oh that was nothing, or maybe said simply, That was weird. It’s about to show up again. There is a distinct pattern.” He pointed to a larger display with a laser pointer. “It will appear here, but just for a few seconds.”

“Dans la ceinture Kuiper,” I said.

“Très bon,” Monfils said.

“C’est là que je cacherais quelque chose,” I said.

“Your French is good,” Monfils said. “But you sound like an American speaking Parisian French. Je viens d’Haïti.”

“I have never been there.”

“I don’t like Parisians.”

“I see.”

“Now. There it is.” Monfils pointed at the screen.

I tried hard to see what he was talking about. Sill was trying, too.

“Gone,” Monfils said. “It was flickering, kind of greenish. Someone might think it was just a chromatic aberration, but we know better, don’t we?”

“We do indeed,” Sill said.

“Fourteen seconds. Not thirteen, not fifteen. Always fourteen.”

“Next time it shows up, it’s mine,” Sill said.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Two days, one hour, three minutes, and seven seconds,” Monfils said.

“When that thing makes its next appearance, it will be vulnerable. That’s when the comm satellite receives the data from the telescope, encrypts it, and sends it back to Earth as if it were just a bunch of calls to Grandma or Aunt Sally.”

“Okay,” I said. “So how do you end up with it? How does it become yours?”

“When that window is opened, so to speak, when that little lady up there cracks open her legs, to put it another way, I’m going to be there. I’m taking over and sending my instructions to it, ponying backward on the transmission it’s streaming. Sort of like a digital salmon swimming upstream. Then nothing is mine. And we’ll get to see just how much we can do with absolutely, positively, pure nothing. Excited?”