Paul and I rolled up our pant legs and waded into the frigid surf with her, hand in hand. “So warm,” she said. “Feel the sand.”

We gave her a line to hold, just a clothesline that was in the back of the van, and she floated out past the breakers for a few minutes, Space Force divers watching her anxiously. They didn’t want to preside over the first Martian to die of drowning. She might have enjoyed the irony.

The time for the launch approached. The camera crew had written our names in the sand (Dustin remarked on the metaphor) where we were supposed to stand. We took our positions and watched the countdown on the off-camera monitor.

I had visions of the old twentieth-century launches, a roaring fury of fire and smoke. But they didn’t have free power. In our case it was kind of a hiss and a screech, a nuclear-powered steam engine. A blue-white star sizzling in its tail.

It rose slowly. At first it looked like ad Astra, but of course it was one of the replicas they’d used for practice. The nose had some white stuff painted thickly on, which Paul called an “ablative layer.” I had to think of the thick white sunscreen he’d been wearing the day we met, in the Galápagos, the day before I left Earth.

It was pretty high when the light in its tail went out. The monitor went out, too, then flickered back on as the sound of the rocket stopped abruptly.

Spy again, on the monitor. Shaking its head.

“You don’t listen, do you?”

The rocket started falling in a tailspin, then rolled to point down.

“I suppose we have to be less subtle.”

The rocket nosed into the ocean, about a mile away, raising a high white spume.

“All this energy that you call ‘free’ comes to you at the expense of a donor world in a nearby universe. You are donors now.” The monitor went dead.

A tracking airplane pancaked into the sea and sank. Another plummeted to crash on the beach to the south.

The camera crew were shouting into their phones.

A jet plane that had been high screamed to its death in the sea.

I went to my purse. The phone was blank. Namir slid into the driver’s seat of a van and punched the START button over and over.

Snowbird stopped toweling herself and looked in some direction. “So this is the end,” she said, as if you had asked her for the time.

“Idiots,” Paul said.

“Surprise,” Dustin said.

Even Elza was almost speechless. “So what do we do now?”

For some reason they looked at me. I was standing at the gate. I tried it and it swung open, its electronic lock dead.

“I think we better start walking.”