Well, they couldn’t really claim the ad Astra hadn’t returned. What’s left of our iceberg is still bigger than the Hilton, and you can see that in the sky all over the Pacific, brighter than the Pole Star.

Of course, when we got off the lander, we’d go straight into biological isolation. No telling what kind of bug we might be bringing back from the Others. Though a bug that thrived in liquid nitrogen might find human body temperature a little too warm. And there had been nothing alive on the planet Home to infect us. If Spy had told the truth.

We might have been infected with something accidentally or on purpose. Spy was an artificial organism designed to interface with humans. But then so were the Martians, and they had carried the pathogen for the juvenile pulmonary cysts that gave the colonists such trouble.

I should have asked about Israel—find out whether the country I worked for all my life still exists. My notebook didn’t pull any new information about anything, which was not necessarily suspicious. Fifty-year-old hardware and software. But it would be nice to find out some information about the world that hadn’t been handed to us by handlers.

I should be grateful for a few more hours of blissful ignorance and obscurity. The idea of celebrity is not compatible with my choice of career, and thus with my personality. Not that I will ever be a spy again, whatever Israel is or is not today.

Maybe I’ll take up music seriously. Practice several hours a day. That would keep Dustin out of the house.

My notebook pinged in my personal tone. Funny, the only people with that number were close enough to come knock.

I thumbed it, though—and an image of Moonboy appeared!

“I trust I have your attention.”

“Moonboy?”

“Yes and no.” There was a short transmission delay. “This signal is coming from the Moon, but Moonboy is not there. This is a sentient cartoon. The signal is an encrypted and filtered tightbeam that only you, Namir, can receive and decode.”

“Okay. What’s up?”

“This cartoon has detected that you are not on Earth.”

“That’s right. We’re in orbit, near—”

“You must land on Earth as soon as possible. Leave space by midnight, Greenwich time, April 23. Tell no one that I talked to you.”

“Not even other—”

“Midnight, April 23.”

The screen went blank. I asked it for the source, and it said LUNA NEAR CLAVIUS.

Midnight on the 23 would be 7 P.M. April 22 in New York; 4 P.M. in the Mojave Desert. We’d be landing that morning, if things went according to plan.

Best make sure things do go according to plan. There was no way to interpret that message other than ominously.

I could use a drink, maybe something stronger than wine. I opened the door, pulled myself up the trellis, and floated over the arbor toward the warehouse.