“So you doubt that we should ever have found the outside. Why not? Clearly we did. Are you certain that we had to have a Galileo in our midst? Or a Vatican?”

“No,” said Hollis. “It’s just that the difficulties must have been multiplied in your case. They must have been great. Even if you suspected there was a world above the ice, what could you do about it? Start chipping away at the ceiling? Start tunneling up through it? If your world was anything like Europa or Enceladus, you would have tunneled a lava tube all the way to the surface. Cryovolcanism: the moment they broke through, your explorers would have erupted naked into vacuum—a very poor advertisement for further space exploration. And even when you finally did emerge onto the surface in space suits, what did you think the stars were when you saw them for the first time, after so many millions of years of living without sight of anything like them? How did you even see the stars in the first place?”

“What my history could tell you,” the enemy said, “if I were to reveal it to you, is that you should not have asked these questions.”

“What do you mean?”

“You ask bad questions. And did I not tell you that some answers can destroy both the question and the questioner?”

“How so?”

“You know damned well how,” Thaw Tint said with perfectly simulated inflections of bitterness. “If I tell you that my world has an atmosphere, or confirm for you that it does not have an atmosphere, I will begin a process of elimination for you. And you might begin to guess from that where we came from.”

“So what?” Hollis asked with genuine bitterness. “You’ve already told us about Michael Jackson and ‘Star Trek.’ I’d say that narrows the field down to a couple of dozen light-years. What harm can there be in telling us where you came from or where you’re taking us? There’s precious little chance that we could manage to escape from this cage with that information, or accomplish very much with it even if we did.”

“So why do you want to know?” Thaw Tint sneered. “Why should I give you the answer?”

“Because there is no chance of escape for us. Whom could you tell? Is anyone left?”

“I’ll give you that it’s an extremely low-probability event—the pair of you ever escaping and breeding a colony where we could never find you; but, no, I cannot discuss my origins, can I? My orders are against it.”

Jonathan, who was sitting on the edge of a couch and seemingly lost in thought, looked up suddenly and blurted, “Orders?”

Hollis and Thaw Tint ignored him.

“So which would be easier for you,” the enemy asked, “that I tell you nothing or that I tell you that some of your assumptions are wrong?”

“Orders?” Jonathan asked again. He was standing now. “Who gives you orders?”

Thaw Tint made a peculiarly human pointing motion with one tentacle, as if incapable of withholding what was demanded of him. Jonathan looked where the enemy was pointing and saw nothing except a clump of black fronds and two silver crabs.