Before the Other made its spectacular exit, it prepared an equally spectacular exit for the human race. The head Martian, my friend Red, was unknowingly a direct conduit to the otherworldly source of energy that powered the Martian civilization, and when he died, that connection would open up, with world-destroying intensity.

The world it destroyed would not be Mars. The Other had contrived to send Red to Earth before the time bomb was triggered.

Red knew he didn’t have long. He asked my husband Paul, who is a pilot, to take him to the other side of the Moon to die. There was no way of knowing exactly how large the explosion was going to be, but presumably the Moon had enough mass to block it.

It did. Red’s funeral pyre was bright enough to be seen light-years away, but only a few gamma rays leaked through.

Would the Others see the flare and assume that their little problem—the existence of the human race—had been solved?

That was not likely. We had to go to them.

5

LOGICS

Magic trumps science for most people, and wishful thinking drives a lot of decision-making. So a large and vocal fraction of the human race thought the best way to deal with the Others would be to lie low.

If we didn’t try to contact them and didn’t broadcast any signals into space—who needs to, since everybody has cable?—then the Others would think that their plan had worked, and so would leave us alone.

Of course there’s no cable between Earth and Mars, but the idea of abandoning Mars actually sounded pretty attractive to some, since without Mars none of this would have happened.

Then there was also the problem that we didn’t think to turn off all the transmitters right after the big explosion on the other side of the Moon, so it would be like closing the barn door long after the horse had trotted off to Wolf 25.

A different kind of logic asserted that we had better start building a defense against the Others right now. Assuming that the ship that left Triton couldn’t go faster than the speed of light, it would be more than twenty-four years before they got back home and found out Earth had survived, and a similar time before they came back.

A half century can be a long time in the evolution of weapons. Fifty years before Hiroshima, soldiers were still killing each other with bayonets and single-shot bolt-action rifles.

With unlimited energy, we could make our own planet- buster. And a starship to take it to them.

A lot of humans (and all Martians) thought that was a really bad idea. There was no reason to assume that what they did on Triton and the Moon represented the pinnacle of the Others’ ability to do damage. If we got them angry, they might flip a switch and blow up the Sun. They might send us all off to wherever the energy was coming from. Or some other place from which there would be no returning.