“You are the finest heroes in Earth’s history, hurtling into the unknown on a mission that will almost surely end with your deaths.

“We ask that you make this grim probability a glorious certainty. Rather than slowing down, we would ask you to continue accelerating. Going at almost the speed of light—and invisible until the last moment—you will strike the enemy planet with ten thousand times the force of the meteorite that brought about the extinction of the dinosaurs.

“Even the ungodly science of the Others cannot protect them from this apocalyptic assault. Please answer that you have heard and are willing to give your life in this noble enterprise.

“God bless you and keep you.”

We all just stared at each other. “Who is that guy?” I said. “Lazlo what?”

“Motkin,” Namir said. “He’s a cubevangelist.”

“Powerful signal,” Paul said. “Pretty tight laser.”

Namir shrugged. “He has lots of money, or did when money meant something, and a powerful broadcast site in the Atlantic, beyond the seven-mile limit. He could do it once.”

“Once?” Paul said.

“They’ll have people like me in the water in thirty minutes. Home-land Security. Unless Reverend Motkin really is president of the world, he’s about to have a serious accident.”

“Or had it about a week ago,” Paul said.

“It’s hard to get used to that. He was arrested or dead before that message was a tenth of the way here.”

“What if he really is king of the world,” Moonboy said, “or president or whatever. Some pretty loony people have made it to the top, even in normal times.”

“I still wouldn’t feel I had to kill myself on his behalf,” Dustin said.

“Besides, the order is stupid,” Paul said. “We don’t know for certain which planet in the Wolf 25 system is their home world.” There was a “cold Earth” planet that seemed likely, but also two gas giants with Triton-sized satellites.

“As we get closer, we might be able to tell which one it is,” Moonboy said.

“It probably would be the one with all the missiles rising up to greet us.”

“Maybe not,” Namir said. “If we stopped accelerating the last month or so, we’d be coming in cold. They might not detect us until it was too late to respond. We’d still be going at 99 percent the speed of light.”

“You’re not arguing in favor of this kamikaze scheme,” Elza said.

“Not this particular one. President of the world. But it’s always been a possible strategy.”

“As I said before,” Snowbird said, “if we’re going to die anyhow, we could still exercise some control over the situation that way.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t sign up for a suicide mission. Besides, even if we knew what planet they were on, we don’t know who else might inhabit it. It might be like destroying Earth just to get Lazlo what’s- his-name.”