But now something stranger had indeed turned up, eyeless and intelligent and warlike. It decorated the floors and walls of its stateroom with chandeliers of ice, and it called itself Thaw Tint.

The enemy had told Hollis that his people were alarmed when they began to suspect that her people had gone out searching for them; but the very nature of Thaw Tint’s existence told her that her people had gotten the story of life in the universe all wrong, and that they might never have found Thaw Tint no matter how much he feared them. Thaw Tint was an ice worlder. There was no doubt about it. Yet all Earth’s starships and listening devices had been designed, chauvinistically, to seek civilizations on Earth-like planets—worlds of just the right mass located just the right distance from just the right kind of star. Even a quick look around Sunspace should have made it plain that the right kind of star was not needed, if one was looking for Darwin’s warm little ponds. From Europa and Enceladus, Ganymede and Titan, Hollis’ people should have guessed immediately that the Atlantic and Pacific were far outnumbered by icebound seas, and that all the universe really needed for the production of habitable worlds was the right kind—and not even necessarily just the right kind—of gravitational flexing.

The orbit of Jupiter would do just as nicely as Uranus or Proxima Centauri, Hollis realized. We need only look someplace cold, she told herself. Still… she could not quite understand how eyeless beings in an underground ocean had broken out to the surface and discovered the stars, or how they had managed to build a civilization in the first place without aid of fire and electricity. The questions raised by Thaw Tint’s existence were so new that one could barely furnished criteria for how to go about answering them. But she did understand that her Earth had been a galactic minority all along, if not a downright freak: a rocky world with its oceans outside. There were so many more balls of ice out there, so many more throws of the biochemical dice. It occurred to her, now, too late to be of practical use to anyone, that almost all life in the galaxy must exist inside ice worlds.

Hollis always slept uneasily aboard the ship. It was the vibration of distant engines that kept her awake, and it should not have been so. The cage was quieter than Alvin and a hundred times more comfortable. The vibration was felt more than heard. It barely shook the bones and after only an hour, one relegated it to the realm of ordinary background noise. But it was always there, reminding her that the ship was continually accelerating toward an unknown destination.

In fitful dreams she found herself rising to face her God, and from the depths of unexplainable inequity demanding a solution to the timeless mystery of senseless evil.

Hollis got her answer—the same answer given to Job—which at first hearing answered nothing, and at the same time answered all. God spoke to her out of a roaring storm, saying, “Who is this that darkens council by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me!