For long days, Thaw Tint observed the creatures in the darkness of their unfurnished cage. At first they had huddled on the far side of the room, away from each other, ingesting whatever foods and medicines were thrown to them. After a time they became restless and began exploring, crawling blindly with outstretched fingers, backing away from each other whenever they touched. Now they had marked the room off in paces and could walk across it without banging their noses. Having lived with their sun above during the day, and their cities aglow with artificial light at night, Thaw Tint wondered if there were ever times when the humans missed the darkness. He suspected that it must have been difficult to live always in the light. And yet they seemed so utterly and uniquely helpless in the dark.

It was time, he decided, to let them see his face. He swam down from the ceiling and wrapped himself around a small console bound by pipes and rigging. Five of his tentacles completely covered a touch-tone screen, and as if it were merely an Earthly pad obeying his scrawls and squeals, the screen summoned an array of hastily constructed tubes to life, filling his room with a warm yellow glow.

When Alvin was snatched into the sky, Hollis had half expected to see a flying saucer; but the Intruder ship was much stranger than a saucer. She knew at once that it was alien, but there was an eerie familiarity about the craft, reminding her of Graff, Nautile, or any of the other Valkyries, as if its design had been shamelessly copied by the Intruders. Like a Valkyrie, its core was a ten-kilometer tether. As a giant, retrofitted fishing line reeled Alvin in, Hollis estimated that the ship’s frame could not have been more than four or five centimeters in diameter. It was a thin, translucent thread of light pointing away from her toward the constellation Taurus. When she saw it for the first time through the porthole of the submarine, with easily recognizable antihydrogen containment vessels and water tanks strung along its nearer end, she thought of a glittering pearl necklace adrift in space, or the beaded tendrils of a Portuguese man-of-war—deadly yet hauntingly beautiful, and beautiful because it was so deadly.

There were subtle differences between the alien ship and a Valkyrie, such as the ominously larger propellant tanks and, of course, the “fishing line,” but there were no wild divergences. Hollis guessed that this was not necessarily an act of copying. Just as hydrodynamics dictated that all attack submarines be long and narrow with fins and conning towers in just the right places, and just as all airplanes would have wings, so, too, could all antimatter-driven rockets be expected to look alike. One did not want to intercept a great deal of gamma radiation from the matter-antimatter reaction zones, so the engine was mostly magnetic fields and empty space; and because it was energy expensive to accelerate even a single gram of matter up to and then decelerate it down from relativistic speed, starship design required ultralight construction. Instead of a large metal pusher plate at the bottom of a girder-supported tower and a crew compartment sitting on top of the tower—as would have been the case with a conventional rocket— mass reduction logic put the engine up front, where thick girders were replaced by a long thread that pulled the crew compartment and all of its supporting equipment along, like a motorboat pulling a water-skier. Giant pusher plates were replaced by magnetic coils and shadow shields, held in place by a system of thin, translucent rigging that resembled a spider’s web. Being as close to nothing as anything could be and still be something, the starship was a glorified kite whose sail was a massless, odorless, invisible sheet of magnetic field lines. It flew on a muon wind of its own creation, dragging everyone and everything along on the end of a string. When all was said and done, the bridge to the stars was nothing more than an elaborate rope trick.