One of the crew had suggested that premature detonation might reveal the Cat’s position; but Justin pointed out that it would be impossible for the enemy to distinguish the interception from a collision with naturally occurring interstellar dust, and that even if the explosion was potentially revealing, it was infinitely less dangerous than doing nothing.

The point was moot. Curiously, the dust shield intercepted nothing.

Presently, the Belly of the Cat was full of people. That they had not yet been R-bombed did little to stay their mounting anguish. Joshua knew that before the Promised Land was reached and settled, a healing had to take place inside the people of the Cat. They had to be instructed, made to see a sustaining and nourishing vision, and come to believe in their future survival and growth as if it were already an accomplished fact. He had to open a window on the next century and pass the Cat through it.

He reached again into himself, into the clarities bom of atrocity, and saw humanity’s militant future. There was no need to hide judgment in the smoke of fear. His people were already fearful and judgmental enough of the aliens. The trick, then, was to exorcise their fear, to whatever degree possible, and hold out to them the promise of a miraculous rebirth.

“What our enemy does not yet know,” he announced, “is that it has already saved us.”

“What are you talking about?” a tired voice called out.

“We have, in reality, slipped through their natural selection filter. We’ve been chosen.”

A faint, mocking murmur passed through the gathering, but Joshua ignored it and said, “Something very much like this happened sixty-five million years ago, when our ancestors were very small and ratlike. They survived by hiding in the nooks and crannies of the dinosaurs’ world. And then one day something destroyed almost all the life—most notably the dinosaurs—yet allowed our termite eating forebears to tread the Earth unimpeded and become us.

“The process is repeating. Now it is we who are very near to being extinct, and we would be, if not for one unlikely and still hidden development: the enemy struck too late. Humanity had already begun to metastacize into the Asteroids, into the Saturnian Rings, into the deeps of space. If the aliens had struck a hundred years ago, or even fifty, they would have gotten us all. But instead we live to find the brown dwarf, to settle modestly, for the time being, into the nooks and crannies of our enemy’s house.”

“For how long?” a young male voice shouted, full of an odd mixture of grief and aggression. “They can catch us at any time.”

“If they suspect we exist,” Joshua replied, glancing over at Justin. His friend seemed to be smiling with approval—or was it simply the acceptance of the inevitable? Joshua had not been able to escape the feeling that Justin sometimes simply wanted to lie down and die.

“We are the ones who escape,” Joshua continued, “at first by pure luck. Then by becoming the strongest, the brightest, the most inventive.”