"Lord, I wish we could do it right now. The Australians have told just about everything, and their case is even weirder than our own. They have robots coming out of their rocks."

"What?" Edward sat on the edge of the bunk. "Is it on the news?"

"You should watch your TVs. There are newspapers in your food drawers now. Starting tomorrow, you'll be getting CD machines. Infonet players. We don't want you to be ignorant when the President gets here."

Edward pulled open his food drawer, a stainless-steel tray that shuttled through the walls of the isolation unit, and pulled out a folded newspaper. There were no personal messages for him. His off-and-on girlfriend in Austin didn't expect him back for a month or two; he hadn't spoken to his mother in months. Edward began to regret his fancy-free life-style. He unfolded the newspaper and quickly scanned the headlines.

"Jesus, are you reading what I'm reading?" Reslaw asked.

"Yeah," Edward said.

"They look like chrome-plated gourds."

Edward flipped through the pages. The Australian Armed Forces had gone on alert. So had the United States Air Force and Navy. (Not the Army? Why not the Army?) Shuttle launches had been canceled, for reasons not clearly spelled out.

"Why robots?" Minelli asked after a few minutes of silence. "Why not more creatures?"

"Maybe they found out they can't take the atmosphere and the heat," Minelli suggested. "So they send remotes."

That seemed to make the most sense. But if there were two disguised spacecraft—and why disguised?—then there could certainly be more.

"Maybe it's an invasion," Stella said. "We just don't know it yet."

Edward tried to recall the various science fiction scenarios he had read in books or seen in television and movies.

Motivations. No intelligent beings did things without motives. Edward had always sided with the scientists who thought Earth too puny and out of the way to be of interest to potential spacefarers. Of course, that was geocentrism in reverse. He wished he had read more on SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Nearly all of his science reading was in geology now; he seldom read magazines like Scientific American or even Science unless he needed to catch up on relevant articles.

Like most experts, he had grown insular. Geology had been his life. Now he doubted whether he would ever again have a private life. Even if the four of them were released—and that question worried him more than he wanted to admit—they would all be public figures, celebrities. Their lives would change enormously.

He shut off the player and turned to the comics page of the Los Angeles Times. Then he lay back on the bunk and tried to sleep. He had slept enough. His anger was getting to the point where he didn't think he could control it. What would he tell Crockerman? Would he rattle the bars of his cage and hoot miserably? That seemed the only appropriate response.