“I should hope so. You certainly have more than enough heat to exchange.”

“Can we get past the chitchat?” said Hollis. “I have to know—are we all there is? Is anyone else left alive?”

“Not on Earth,” the alien replied. “That is certain.”

“Have you found others? Away from Earth?”

“Yes.”

“Are they alive?”

“No.”

As Jonathan watched, Hollis got up from her chair and turned her back on the alien, and he realized that Thaw Tint’s words had struck her deeply with their implications. He knew what she felt, but pushed it away, telling himself that the time for caring was now past.

“I still don’t understand,” Hollis said, turning to face the tank. “What did we ever do to deserve such wrath?”

“Wrath?” Thaw Tint asked. “How can you think it was a punishment? Wrath? This was nothing like human beings warring with each other. There was never any anger toward you. Why do you not understand this?”

“But you destroyed the Earth, didn’t you?” she asked, as if her question could undo the fact.

“Yes.”

“Then the universe makes no sense….”

“For us to wait until you became a threat to us— that would have made no sense. We knew your hopes better than you did, better than you know them even now. We know you were testing antimatter rockets, and as intelligent as you were, we knew that you would soon boost yourselves to even greater abilities.”

“You were afraid that we’d become smarter than you?” Jonathan scoffed, and sat down again in his chair. “You should have studied us a little more closely. Doesn’t work. Not on vertebrates, at least. Not on Earth. No one was in a hurry to volunteer for human experiments after we tried to give the brain boost to a bunch of apatosaur pups. They taught us how easily you can throw the whole nervous system into chaos and crash yourself. It’s sort of like slapping hydrogen and antihydrogen together in your living room: not the sort of mistake you can learn from.”

Thaw Tint shifted uneasily in his console. “You would have returned to the problem sooner or later—and give yourselves some credit—eventually you would have solved it. And then, with the intelligence to even further boost your intelligence, to hybridize with your artificial intelligences, and with relativistic rockets at hand, you would have become as a wildfire to us. And there was a very real chance that you would have destroyed us at the first opportunity.”

“But why would we want to?” Jonathan asked. “If we became more intelligent, wouldn’t we become less destructive for that reason? Wouldn’t we seek—peaceful contact?”

Hollis stepped forward. “No,” she said, grabbing his arm. “High intelligence doesn’t mean you’re incapable of evil deeds. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. Just look around!”

“My dear octopus,” Jonathan sneered, “I may be a bit thick, but I still don’t understand why you think we would have destroyed you.”

“Because you could not afford not to. What risk of racial death would be acceptable to you? Two percent? One tenth of one percent? Any risk at all is too great. Removing that risk would not have involved hatred on your part, only pragmatic fear, as you would say. I’m sure if all your historical records were available to you, they would confirm that one or two farsighted individuals among you had anticipated all that has happened. Only a few such insights would have been enough to set you against us.”