I guess someone had to articulate it. “In the worst case, there will be nothing there except a messenger from the Others, which will detect and destroy us with no hesitation or explanation.” No one looked surprised.

“The main assumption is that one or both, Moonboy and Fly-in-Amber, survives the transformation process with memory intact. That memory will include the construction of the fleet, and once that’s revealed, Earth will go the way of the Others’ Home. They can make the flight to Earth a little faster than we, with more acceleration, so the destruction may be a fait accompli by the time we arrive.”

“Always the starry-eyed optimist,” Paul said.

“You asked for the worst case. Anybody want to try for the best case?”

“It was all a bad dream,” Dustin said. “We wake up in 2088.”

And discover we’ve been fed a psychotropic drug,” Elza said, “which gave us all the same dream. Or we could hope it is all real, but the Others will take a long long time to respond, like thousands of years.”

“Or they may not care,” Dustin said. “The fleet’s just there to protect the Earth. It’s not capable of interstellar travel, not by several orders of magnitude.”

“Not yet,” Elza said.

“It would take too much fuel,” Paul said. “How many icebergs like this one are there? And the logistics and expense of launching just one were like a major world war.”

That seemed kind of simplistic to me. The only reason we need the iceberg is that we haven’t completely figured out how the “free” energy works. We use the free energy to initiate fusion, which makes the antimatter which makes . . . energy.

“None of you are considering a middle course,” Snowbird said, “between being destroyed by the Others and being ignored. But I think this is the most likely: they long ago predicted this situation—creation of the fleet—as a possible outcome of their actions and yours. Their response to this outcome was decided before we even left the solar system. And the machinery to implement that response was also in place before we left.”

I had to agree. “That does sound like them, Snowbird. What do you think that machinery might be?”

“Doomsday,” Elza said. “Like last time, but bigger.”

Snowbird made an odd gesture, two fingers on her small hands pointing out and counterrotating. “I think not. That would be inelegant.”

“Too direct?” I said. “They do seem to prefer doing things in complicated ways.” Like the roundabout way they first contacted us, a code within a code, even though they understood human languages and had no apparent reason to be obscure.

“It’s stranger than that,” she said. “Complicated becomes simple, and simple becomes complicated.

“This is something that Fly-in-Amber and I disagreed on. He felt we understood the Others better than humans do. I think we just misunderstand them in different ways.”

“You’re products of their intelligence.”