In America alone, nearly 10 percent of the college and university teaching staff departed. Special elections had to be called as almost the same number of Senators left. So did several members of the Supreme Court. Worldwide, they were accompanied by a large number of Nobel Prize winners, something like half of all the winners of the Association for Computing Machinery’s A.M. Turing Award for computer science, and a significant number of physicists, chemists, and other scientists. International chess competition took a sizable hit. Representatives in every field from engineering to policing were among the travelers. Surprisingly, only about 10 percent of American doctors left. Unsurprisingly, nobody minded much when they were accompanied by an equivalent number of lawyers.

Not just writers, but painters, sculptors, composers, singers, actors, directors, and many others joined their often less-recognized brethren in taking up the Gadeu offer. Many creative people left. Many funny people left.

Civilization would survive the Gadeuan Emigration, but with parts missing. Many of whose significance would not be properly noted until some time had passed.

Television had become a dead issue for Dev. He couldn’t bear watching load after load of smiling, happy émigrés leaving aboard the most recently arrived Gadeu craft. Though millions remained to be transported to the Gadeu worlds, he was always sure each ship would be the last. Then all would be silence. Until the Gadeu thought it feasible, or worthwhile, to have contact with their homeworld again. The rest of humankind would be left to sit, and squabble, and deplete the planet’s resources and devastate its ecology until such time as it finally reduced itself to ashes or the Gadeu or some other curious galactic race thought to drop by and perhaps lend a helping tentacle.

It was not where he wanted to be.

He supposed he’d been lucky. At least he had, however unwillingly and inadvertently, enjoyed the privilege of spending some time in the company of other sentient species. He, alone of his kind, had stood on the surface of another world, albeit for a less than exalted purpose. He had known something of travel among the stars, and advanced artificial intelligence, and what could be done if minds were applied to the common good (even if sometimes it was an illegal common good). Those memories would always be his, where others of a similar mindset could only dream of experiencing such wonders.