"Do you remember that night, when Grant and Danielle and Becky were yisiting, and Chris Riley called . . . To tell you about Europa?"

He nodded.

"I was really afraid then. I don't know why. I knew it was far away."

Arthur saw Europa boiling, great chunks of ice flashing into linear rays of steam, other chunks lifting away, and beneath it all, a spreading, perfectly smooth sphere of light, as white and pearly as parachute silk and bright as the sun, pushing the ice and steam out into space . . .

"What really happened to Europa?" she asked.

"I think our friends . . . our . . . friends, ate it," he said. "Turned it into more of their own spacecraft." And the huge chunks of ice, sent inward to Mars and Venus? No images or memories explained them.

"Then I shouldn't have been afraid."

"Oh, yes," Arthur said. "You were right to be afraid. You knew before I did."

She nodded in agreement. "I did, didn't I? What does that make me? Psychic?"

She was talking just to be talking. He knew that, and he didn't mind; her words soothed him.

"A woman," he said.

"How quaint."

He grinned against her hair and kissed her.

"It's funny, but in all of this, I've been thinking of you and Marty, and ... my book. The Huns and Mongols and Scythians and Indo-Europeans . . . All those people and my book. I'll never get it finished."

"Don't be so sure," he said, but it hurt him to say it.

"Do you think these probes are like the hordes? Migrating, ravaging, pushed on by famine or overpopulation?"

"No," he said. "It's a big galaxy. We've seen nothing like that." But would we know where and how to look?

"Why are they doing it, then?" she asked.

"You listened to Harry's tape."

"I'm not sure I understood it."

"You understand it as well as I do," Arthur said, squeezing her shoulders.

Long dark shape, a single needle, pointing at Europa 's heart, the rocky core, wrapping long collecting fields around the ice and steam, gathering it in, paring away the hydrogen atoms from the oxygen, fusing them. Piercing the core . . .

And again, no more.

"Have you decided yet?" Francine asked softly.

"Decided what?"

"Marty asked this morning ..."

"I thought I'd made that clear."

"I just need to be told again."

"Yes. We're staying together. I'm taking you both with me, wherever I go."

"Good," she said.

Francine finally slept, but Arthur did not. He was haunted by his "memory"—Lehrman's, actually—of the expression on the President's face.

Do you believe in God?

I believe in punishment.

PERSPECTIVE

The Los Angeles Electronic Times,

Unsigned editorial in the Opinion Track,

January 10, 1997: